Annette Kilgore, 69, who picked out her Spanish retirement home on the Channel 4 program “A Place in the Sun,” died in the wildfire that broke out on Thursday, July 9, 2026, and tore through Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, one of the 15 people the fire killed. Her husband, Malcolm Timbrell, 70, had appeared beside her on the show; he survived.
With the toll now at 15, the blaze is what Spanish broadcasters describe as the deadliest wildfire in Andalusia’s recorded history. Of those killed, 14 were foreign nationals, nine of them British.
Michelle Leake, a British carer who had lived in Spain for more than 20 years, was the latest to die. Two months earlier she was burned while trying to help a 93-year-old woman she cared for escape the flames. Burns covered about 40 percent of her body, and the burns unit at Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío in Seville was where she died, in the early hours of Tuesday, September 8. That woman died in hospital on July 12.
Another patient at the same Seville unit, a woman with burns to 70 percent of her body, died on July 28. Spanish authorities have not released her name or nationality.
The flames started near Los Gallardos and pushed toward Bédar, a village of fewer than 1,000 people. Adults accounted for all 15 of the dead — 10 women and five men. Alongside the Britons, three were Belgian, one French and one American, and one was a Spanish citizen. Authorities evacuated nearly 1,500 people across Almería province, home to many foreign residents along the Mediterranean coast.
The Home They Found on TV
Kilgore and Timbrell moved from Cornwall to Bédar after their 2023 appearance on the show, with the program’s presenter, Leah Charles-King, walking them through the purchase. Kilgore had built a career in mental health, and at the start of their episode she spoke about settling gradually into life in Spain. The pair had been together for 17 years. She got out of the house as the fire bore down on the village and then vanished; authorities later formally identified her body among the dead.
Timbrell told the BBC that the flames reached their street and he lost sight of his wife and of seven friends and neighbors. Charlie and Lilly, the two cats that belonged to him and Kilgore, were the reason he turned back, though the group had agreed to drive out together. By the time he set off after the others, their vehicles had been abandoned and they were trying to flee on foot. He shouted at them not to walk into the fire — which he has since been told was advancing at more than 20 kilometers an hour — but they believed it was their only way out. “They had no chance,” Timbrell told the BBC.
He sheltered inside a car with one of the cats as the fire closed in. The group had been driving six vehicles, and four of them caught fire at once, he said; as each one ignited he moved to the next, and the final two, scorched and blistered, held. “We have had an amazing life together and now it’s stopped,” he told the broadcaster.
Channel 4 presenter Jasmine Harman paid tribute once word of the deaths in Bédar broke. She said the loss had left her devastated, and offered sympathy to everyone who had lost someone, and to Timbrell in particular.
Abandoned Cars on the Road Out
Pete and Fran Gillam, a British couple settled in Bédar, were killed as well. Their daughter, Danielle Gillam-Kirton, posted on Facebook that police had confirmed her parents did not survive. She also thanked those who had sent the family love, support and prayers.
A burned-out car with its steering wheel on the right — an indication that the occupants were British — yielded four bodies, which rescuers pulled from the wreck. Charred vehicles lined the road leading out of the village, and authorities confirmed that some of the dead were in their cars when they tried to flee.
In the first stage of the search, emergency crews recovered 12 bodies burned beyond recognition. Identification therefore depended on DNA samples, and officials asked relatives of the missing to provide them at the civil office in Bédar. The 93-year-old British woman Leake had tried to save went to hospital on Friday, July 10, with burns to roughly 20 percent of her body. Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas in Almería was where she died, on the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, a death that took the toll at that point to 13. Her name has never been made public.
Alive in a Ravine
One search ended differently. Retracing ground they had already covered, Civil Guard officers came upon a ravine just as night fell and found two British walkers there alive — a couple caught out on the hillside, with burns to about 40 percent of their bodies. Sgt. Pedro Barre, one of the officers, told national broadcaster RTVE that officers learn over long service to double back on terrain they have already searched. Getting the pair out took about three hours. Both survived.
The Alert Nobody Sent
Spain’s Es-Alert system, which pushes emergency messages to every mobile phone inside a defined area, went untriggered that day. That much is not in dispute. Whether it should have been fired is the open question.
Antonio Sanz, the Andalusian regional government’s first vice president and its emergencies chief, defended the decision on July 11 from a forward command post in Turre. Instructions varied from one part of the area to another, he said: “People who had to be evacuated would have received messages telling them to shelter, and people who had to shelter would have received messages telling them to evacuate.” An Es-Alert, he said, “could have affected 7,000 residents when we wanted to move out 70.” Asked again on July 23, he argued that scattered homes and limited access made a blanket alert impractical and that direct, personalized warnings from security forces worked better. Fallen poles, he said, had knocked out communications.
What reached residents varied from place to place. Church bells were rung. The town hall sent WhatsApp messages. The mayor, councilors, volunteers and local police knocked on doors. An investigation published on July 22 found that the warnings reached people unevenly, with five residents saying they received nothing at all. Bob Layton, a retired British technical manager, said that “if I had received any advice to stay in my home we would have been dead.” Bédar’s municipal emergency plan had last been approved in 2019 and was still being updated, the same investigation found, and of the 103 municipalities in Almería province, only 42 had emergency plans at all, with just nine meeting the four-year update requirement.
The first call to the emergency line came at 4:29 p.m., from someone reporting a burning electrical cable. The regional government waited until 7:37 p.m. to activate the first operational level of its emergency plan. The opposition Socialist party’s Andalusian branch, disputing the account that coverage had failed, has demanded records showing which mobile base stations were working and when. The regional government has not retracted or qualified its position.
Families Take the Case to Court
On August 7 the court admitted eight families of the dead as private prosecutors in the criminal case, an arrangement formalized on August 10. Three attended in person; five joined by videoconference from elsewhere in Europe. A ninth family’s application was deferred. One relative told the Spanish news agency EFE that his father had faced an “absence of warnings” before the fire reached him.
Relatives have also set up a group, Help Bédar, to pay for independent expert work on fire behavior, warning systems and evacuation management. Five family members run it, among them Gillam-Kirton and Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt, whose father, Stanislas, was among the Belgian victims. The group’s fundraising page, opened on August 22, states: “No ES-Alert message was sent to phones in the area. Officials have said residents were warned. Our relatives were not reached.” It also poses a comparison: “One week later, a fire near Madrid burned 27,000 hectares, with over 55,000 people evacuated or confined, and nobody died. Why was Bédar different?” As of September 24 the appeal had raised about €10,900 of a €100,000 target from 161 donors.
The Socialist party said on September 16 that it would join the case as an accusing party. Two days later the governing majority in the Andalusian Parliament rejected opposition calls for a parliamentary inquiry, arguing that the judicial investigation was sufficient. The regional government has instead announced an interdepartmental commission on fire prevention.
Bone Fragments in the Burned Car
On August 19, Gillam-Kirton drove to the municipal vehicle pound in Mojácar to look over her parents’ burned-out car, which had been recovered from the El Curato area of Bédar. The Civil Guard had told her the vehicle had been inspected meticulously and that she would find nothing. Inside she found multiple bone fragments, including what she described as part of a human hip on the front seat, along with two mobile phones, several sets of keys, jewelry and money.
Weeks earlier, at a funeral, the family had cremated a single small bone fragment that authorities had given them. “Then who or what did we cremate?” she said.
She reported the find to local police that same day and was sent on to the Civil Guard barracks at Garrucha, where officers suggested the bones were probably animal remains. They went for DNA testing only after she pressed repeatedly, and no result has been made public. The family has since filed an eight-page complaint against the Civil Guard as an institution, rather than against individual officers, asking what analyses were carried out. A senior officer replied on September 17 in three paragraphs, offering condolences and stating that the matter had been referred to the investigating court.
A second family has reported a similar discovery. Verdonckt found human remains and personal effects scattered over the burned ground at El Curato, where his father died — spectacles, shoes, clothing buttons, jewelry and keys. He reported it to local police, who called in the Civil Guard, and he then guided officers across the terrain himself.
A Fallen Cable and a Dispute Over Current
The civil and investigating section of the Tribunal de Instancia in Vera, post 3, is running the judicial investigation under judicial secrecy. It has kept open whether the fire was accidental, negligent or deliberate, and no person or company has been named as a formal suspect.
The focus is an inactive private electrical line near kilometer 511 of the N-340A, which once supplied an abandoned restaurant and nearby rural properties. Witnesses reported seeing a cable fall and throw sparks immediately before the fire started. Endesa says the line was decommissioned in 2009 and was therefore dead; Red Eléctrica says the infrastructure is not part of its network. Court-appointed experts have countered that without live current running through the copper, the sparks witnesses describe would be physically impossible. That contradiction is the central question before the court, and it has not been resolved.
Extreme Heat and What Came After
Temperatures in the area reached around 40 degrees, and parched ground and strong winds drove the flames rapidly through Los Gallardos. Juanma Moreno, president of the regional government of Andalusia, announced on the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, that the fire had been stabilized and its perimeter secured, and authorities let more than 1,000 residents return to evacuated villages. Not until July 24 was it declared fully extinguished. The settled figure for the area burned is about 5,200 hectares (12,850 acres), revised down from the roughly 7,000 hectares estimated while the fire was still active.
In 2026 Spain recorded its second-hottest June on record, and the heat was blamed for upward of 1,000 excess deaths. Figures from the European Forest Fire Information System put the area burned nationwide in 2025 at more than 393,000 hectares, the largest such total since 1994. Spain had lost a further 296,815 hectares by September 16 this year — 44 percent of all land burned across the European Union in 2026.
In July the central government said it would designate the area as seriously affected by a civil protection emergency, which unlocks aid for residents and councils across Los Gallardos, Bédar, Lubrín and Antas. Applications closed on August 24 for a separate regional aid scheme offering residential awards of between €2,580 and €15,120. Forest fire damage is not covered by Spain’s insurance compensation body, a gap the consumer group OCU highlighted in the weeks after the blaze.
Alex Ellis, the British ambassador to Spain, traveled to Almería in the days after the fire and met affected residents. “I have seen today the terrible consequences of the wildfires which have swept through Almeria,” he said, thanking emergency services, local authorities and the embassy’s consular team.
