The wildfire that has killed at least 12 people in southern Spain has burned roughly 6,600 hectares since Thursday, though the situation has now improved, the head of emergency services for the Andalusia region in Spain, said today.

“The situation improved overnight, and weather conditions are allowing us to face the day with better prospects than yesterday,” said Antonio Sanz.

“This is the first day on which we will be able to tackle the fire aggressively. Until now, the conditions, both the weather and the behaviour of the blaze itself, had allowed us to operate only defensively,” he added.

Hundreds of firefighters and military personnel continued to battle the flames on the ground, supported from the air. Nearly 1,500 people have been evacuated from the area.

“The best news we could have is that there are no reports of new casualties,” Sanz noted, according to the Athens News Agency.

“The Guardia Civil, Spain’s paramilitary police force, has combed through all the areas and told us they found no one else. This does not mean that such a thing cannot still happen, but it is encouraging that, after the work the Guardia Civil has done searching through zones that were still active, they found no new victims. At least this gives us hope,” he emphasised.

Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska also struck a cautious note on the number of missing. “We must be careful about reporting that there are supposedly 23 missing people, because that is not the case. We are talking about people whose families have been unable to reach them, but who may well be in a reception centre,” he clarified.

Seven formal missing-person reports have been filed, he added, but until the post-mortem examinations and identification of the recovered bodies are complete, the authorities cannot give a definitive tally, and those seven may be among the 12 people killed in the flames.