Annette Kilgore, 69, had found the Spanish home she retired to on the Channel 4 program “A Place in the Sun.” She died there — one of the 15 people killed by the wildfire that broke out on Thursday, July 9, 2026, and tore through Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province. Her husband, Malcolm Timbrell, 70, who had appeared alongside her on the show, survived.
The toll has since climbed to 15 — the deadliest wildfire in Andalusia’s recorded history, according to Spanish broadcasters. Fourteen of the dead 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 had been burned while trying to help a 93-year-old woman in her care get away from the flames. The burns unit at Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío in Seville treated her for burns to about 40 percent of her body, and she died there in the early hours of Tuesday, September 8. The woman she went back for died in hospital on July 12.
Another patient died in that same Seville unit on July 28, a woman with burns to 70 percent of her body. Spanish authorities have released neither her name nor her nationality.
The flames started near Los Gallardos and pushed toward Bédar, a village of fewer than 1,000 people. Every one of the 15 dead was an adult — 10 women and five men. Alongside the Britons, the dead included three Belgian nationals, one French and one American, plus one Spanish citizen. Evacuation orders reached nearly 1,500 people across Almería province, where many foreign residents live near the Mediterranean coast.
The Home They Found on Television
Cornwall was where Kilgore and Timbrell lived until the show took them to Bédar; their episode aired in 2023, and the program’s presenter, Leah Charles-King, walked the couple through the purchase. Kilgore had spent her career in mental health, and her episode opened with her talking about easing gradually into life in Spain. The two had been together 17 years. When the fire bore down on the village she evacuated the house 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. The group had agreed to drive out together, but Charlie and Lilly, the two cats he and Kilgore owned, sent him back to the house. By the time he set off after the others, their vehicles stood 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 in a car with one of the cats as the fire closed in. Four of the six vehicles the group had been driving went up in flames at the same moment, he said, and each time one ignited he moved to the next; the final two were scorched and blistered but 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 news of the deaths in Bédar emerged. The loss had left her devastated, she said, and she offered sympathy to everyone who had lost someone, and to Timbrell in particular.
Cars Left Behind on the Road Out
Pete and Fran Gillam, a British couple settled in Bédar, were killed as well. Police confirmed to their daughter, Danielle Gillam-Kirton, that her parents did not survive, and she wrote as much on Facebook, thanking those who had sent the family love, support and prayers.
One burned-out car gave up four bodies to rescuers, its steering wheel on the right — an indication that the occupants were British. Charred vehicles stood along 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 so badly that identification required DNA samples, and relatives of the missing were asked to give samples at Bédar’s civil office. The 93-year-old British woman Leake had tried to save went to the hospital on Friday, July 10, with burns to roughly 20 percent of her body. Her death came on the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, at Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas in Almería, and it took the toll at that point to 13. Authorities have never publicly named her.
Two Found Alive in a Ravine
One search ended differently. Two British walkers, a couple caught out on the hillside, turned up alive in a ravine just as night fell, with burns to about 40 percent of their bodies, discovered by Civil Guard officers who were retracing ground they had already covered. One of those officers, Sgt. Pedro Barre, told national broadcaster RTVE that long service teaches officers to double back on terrain they have already searched. Getting the pair out took about three hours. Both survived.
The Warning That Was Never Sent
No one triggered Spain’s Es-Alert system, the tool that pushes emergency messages to every mobile phone within a defined area. That much nobody disputes. Whether it should have been used is the open question.
Antonio Sanz, first vice president of the Andalusian regional government 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.” He said an Es-Alert “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 had knocked out communications, he said.
What reached residents differed 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 by Reuters found that the warnings reached people unevenly, with five residents telling the news agency 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, Reuters also reported, and of Almería province’s 103 municipalities, only 42 had emergency plans at all while just nine met 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. Not until 7:37 p.m. did the regional government 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 came to the court in person, while 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 Danielle Gillam-Kirton and Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt, whose father Stanislas was among the Belgian victims. Their 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.
On September 16 the Socialist party said it would join the case as an accusing party. The governing majority in the Andalusian Parliament rejected opposition calls for a parliamentary inquiry two days later, arguing that the judicial investigation was sufficient. In its place, the regional government has announced an interdepartmental commission on fire prevention.
Bone Fragments Found in the Wreckage
On August 19, Gillam-Kirton drove to the municipal vehicle pound in Mojácar to look over her parents’ burned-out car, 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 before, 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 brought the find to local police the same day, and they sent her on to the Civil Guard barracks at Garrucha, where officers suggested the bones were probably animal remains. Only after she pressed repeatedly were they sent for DNA testing, 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.