Spanish firefighters welcomed the heavy rainfall on Tuesday which helped extinguish wildfires which had been raging for more than a week in the north of the country.
Unseasonal warm weather and high winds set the conditions for more than 200 fires in sparsely populated Cantabria and Asturias characterised by mountain valleys.
Just in Cantabria, some 700 firefighters, soldiers, police and volunteers were needed in the struggle to contain the fires.
Alarmingly, “99 percent” of the fires were set deliberately, according to the head of the regional government of Cantabria, Miguel Angel Revilla.
"There are arsonists, people with bad intentions who are taking advantage of weather conditions never seen before in Cantabria" to set fires, Revilla said.
Now the fires are reported to have been put out although zones of “dying embers that are under control” remain.
Cantabria has enjoyed average high temperatures of 23ºCelsius with little rainfall since September.
Gusts of wind up to 110 kilometres a hour fanned the fires and prevented deployment of water-dropping planes.
The life of a helicopter pilot was lost as his plane crashed in Asturias during the effort to halt the fires.
Emergency services remain on high alert as winds and high temperatures are expected to return. Soldiers and emergency workers are reported to be patrolling the areas to act as deterrents.
Large swathes of forest have been claimed by fire. In Cantabria, at least 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of "extraordinary ecological value" burned over the past week, much of it located in two natural parks.
This year more than 54,000 hectares of agricultural and forest land have been destroyed by fire in Spain, exceeding the combined total gutted in the previous two years, according to agriculture ministry figures.
