Event Dates 2027: what we know so far

Summary

The table below gives a week-by-week overview of the candidate windows being considered for 2027, using data from 2025: historical wildfire-risk levels, heat and cold, rain and wet days, and overlaps with other European burns or events in the Monegros desert. The scale for each column is explained at the bottom of the table, which is reproduced from the working spreadsheet. Click the image to see it full size.

1. What is actually being decided

The 2026 event ran 7–12 July. Without a decision to the contrary, 2027 would sit in the equivalent early-July window — the working assumption in the planning material is 5–11 July 2027.

The question going to the General Assembly is whether to keep that slot or move to a different window. It is a members’ decision: each member of the association has one vote. The deciding vote is planned for Thursday 17 September 2026, online, and keeping the current dates will be a real option on the ballot.

Only members of the association vote; applications approved after the assembly is called still count. Wider community input — including the attendee survey — will inform the vote without being the vote.

2. Wildfire evidence: what has actually happened

This is the main operational reason a date change is being considered. The table below shows the official daily Nivel de Alerta de Peligro de Incendios Forestales (NAPIF) for the site’s alert zone, week by week.

The established site is in Castejón de Monegros, assigned by the Gobierno de Aragón to the Muelas del Ebro–Alcubierre meteoalerta zone. When Roja Plus was issued by comarca in July 2026, the relevant area was Los Monegros.

2.1 Daily alert levels in each candidate week

Each year cell in the underlying table is Green / Yellow / Orange / Red / Red Plus. Hover or focus a cell containing Red or Red Plus to see the exact dates. The 2026 column stops on 22 August 2026; future dates are not filled with assumptions.

This does not prove a particular cancellation probability for 2027. It does substantiate why the authorities’ concern is no longer hypothetical, and why build and strike cannot be excluded from the comparison.

2.3 Recorded fires and area burned

The official IAEST series gives annual fire counts and forest area affected. It is useful context, but it must not be confused with the alert table: ignition count, hectares burned and legal suspension risk are different measures.

2026 note: the latest official statistical bulletin stops on 14 June and does not publish a comparable Los Monegros subtotal. It predates the later June and July alert episodes.

3. Why a change of dates is on the table

The reason is not that July is uncomfortable. It is that a specific legal mechanism now exists which can void an authorisation the association already holds, and that mechanism is live for most of the year. What follows is the formal and regulatory picture as we currently understand it.

3.1 An automatic suspension written into law

Decreto 22/2026, de 11 de marzo (BOA no. 53, 18 March 2026). Article 4(h) provides that under a Roja Plus alert, public events in a forest environment are suspended, along with any event that could generate conditions favouring the start of a forest fire — and that authorisations already granted are suspended (“quedando suspendidas las autorizaciones concedidas”).

This is not a negotiation on the day. On the reading given to us by the comarca, the permit for the camping area ceases to be valid by operation of law the moment Roja Plus is declared. The clause is new in 2026.

A second clause is easy to overlook and matters just as much: Article 4(i) restricts motor-vehicle access to montes to the landowner and emergency or agricultural traffic. That alone would strand build, ingress and egress, independently of whether the event itself remained permitted.

3.2 The trigger is the alert level, not conditions on site

The regime applies because the site is monte de utilidad pública — public-utility forest land — within 400 m of forest mass. Nothing in it turns on measured air quality, on wind on the day, or on how well-run the event is. It fires on the published alert level for the area.

This is why operational excellence does not solve the problem. The event can be, and has been, held up locally as an example of good practice, and still be caught by a trigger that does not look at any of that.

3.3 The mechanism has already been used, on short notice

Roja Plus was declared for the first time on 16–18 August 2025. A festival at La Gabarda park was in progress. In the comarca’s words: “Tuvo que evacuar y punto” — it had to evacuate, full stop.

The warning window was roughly 8.5 hours: declared mid-afternoon, effective 23:59 the same day. A crowd of 2,000–2,400 people cannot be moved off a desert site in that time. That is why, for Elsewhere 2026, the authorities pre-planned an evacuation: buses, Guardia Civil involvement at senior rank, Cruz Roja, and villages designated to receive people. That work was done in advance of an event that then ran without needing it — which is the point. It is contingency planning only carried out by people who expect to have to use it.

3.4 Shelter-in-place has been proposed and refused

The argument that confinement is objectively safer than evacuation — 2,000 people in private vehicles crossing bone-dry terrain at 40°C creates more fire risk than staying put — was made to the authorities at length. The comarca agreed with it, and said so explicitly.

But the comarca’s position is not the binding one. The decision sits with the Gobierno de Aragón / Medio Natural, and the provincial director’s reported answer was “muy clara: que no” — if Roja Plus comes, you evacuate, “con la ley en la mano”, citing generators, fuel on site, kitchens, lighting and 2,000 people.

The significant part was the direction the warning came from: the local authorities most sympathetic to the event were the ones telling us they expected to be overruled.

3.5 The exposure window is six and a half months, not one

Aragón’s época de peligro — the fire-danger season during which Roja Plus can be declared at all — runs 1 April to 15 October (Orden of 20 February 2015, extended by Orden AGM/112/2021). Daily alert levels are published from 1 June to 15 October.

Declarations affecting the site on record: 16–18 August 2025; 26–28 June 2026; 10 July 2026; and 12 July 2026. The first 2026 declaration covered build; the second fell during the event and the third during strike. Ordinary Red alerts affected the site on many additional days, as the daily table in section 2 shows.

So any date from April to mid-October carries the same structural exposure — September at lower probability than July, but identical in kind. This is the single most consequential point for anyone weighing options, and it cuts against several intuitive alternatives.

3.6 Frequency is rising, and the authorities say so explicitly

Figures given by the comarca in June 2026: an average of two fires a day over the preceding twenty days in Los Monegros alone; six fires in Huesca province on a single Sunday. Their summary was that conditions in mid-June are now what 15 July used to look like, and that measures will keep tightening year on year.

August 2026 made the same point a different way: several outdoor events scheduled around the 12 August solar eclipse were cancelled as the fire alerts continued. Sol Obscura, an eclipse gathering that did go ahead, could do so because its site is in the Ebro Delta — wetland, not dry forest terrain.

3.7 Permitting lead times force the decision now

Three permissions are needed, in sequence, and only the last of them is the event permit itself:

1. INAGA — Aragón’s environmental permitting body. Assesses protected species, nesting periods and whether proposed dates are compatible with the site. A three-month statutory clock, but in practice anywhere from three months to a year; an unfavourable report is binding.
2. CHE — the Ebro water authority. Watercourses, crossings, flood risk. A six-month clock, so if it is filed second it becomes the critical path.
3. Comarca de Los Monegros — the event permit, which can only be applied for once the first two are in hand.

This is why the decision cannot be deferred until circumstances force a reaction: by the time you need to react, the paperwork window has already closed. It is also why the answers are unlikely to be back before 17 September.

A cautionary precedent from the same body: a 19,000-person festival at the embalse de La Sotonera was declared no procedente by INAGA in April 2026 — not on a substantive refusal, but because a full assessment could not be concluded before the proposed August dates. The calendar stopped the event, not the merits.

3.8 What we are not claiming

For the sake of a fair record, three things this material does not establish:

• No authority has issued a formal order to move the dates. What exists is a legal mechanism, a demonstrated willingness to use it, and a strong recommendation.
• There is no published prohibition on holding events in any particular month, for fire or for wildlife reasons.
• The event was not shut down in 2026. It ran through two separate event-day Roja Plus declarations, after a three-day declaration during build, on the strength of a very large amount of largely invisible contingency work.

The honest framing is therefore not “we have been told to move”. It is: an instrument exists that can void an authorisation at a few hours’ notice, it has been used, it is live for six and a half months of the year, and the probability of it firing is rising. Members are being asked whether to keep accepting that exposure, and if not, what to move to.

3.9 Separately from the law: heat

There is a second, quite different argument for moving, which should not be confused with the regulatory one because it stands or falls on its own evidence: that mid-July in Monegros has become hot enough to change who comes. Families and older participants in particular are reported to have stopped attending for that reason. Whether that effect is real and how large it is are exactly the sort of questions a poll of attendees can answer, and the regulatory case does not depend on the answer either way.

4. Candidate windows: heat and rain

The tables below are calculated from daily data for the established-site coordinate, 41.7005615, -0.1363139. They compare matching calendar weeks historically; they are not forecasts for 2027.

4.1 Temperature

4.2 Rain

For the current 5–11 July slot, the recent historical median daily high is 34.2°C, with about 2.6 days at or above 35°C and 3.9 nights at or above 20°C in a typical matching week. The mean weekly rain is 6.4 mm, and 65% of matching years had at least 1 mm during the week. May weeks are cooler but not uniformly wetter every week; late September and October have lower heat exposure but materially higher upper-tail weekly rain totals.

Constraints the table does not capture

• May and early June: local advice is that this overlaps peak harvest activity, with tractors and harvesters using the same access roads. The climate table supplies the rain evidence; the harvest constraint is operational local evidence and has not yet been quantified.
• Late September and October: the weekly reanalysis shows lower heat but a higher upper tail for accumulated rain. At a site defined by converging barrancos, the consequence of a concentrated storm is a hydraulic question for CHE; weekly averages cannot resolve flash-flood behaviour at the site.
• School and academic calendars: moving further into the academic year has been raised as a constraint for participants with children, and for teachers and students. This has not been quantified.
• Build and strike: the event week is not the whole footprint. Build begins roughly three weeks before and strike ends roughly ten days after, so any window drags a five-to-six week envelope behind it — which is what the authorities assess, and what a June event would push into May.

5. Other European burns

Part of the work in progress is contacting other events directly — both to understand how a move would affect their communities and ours, and because several of them have moved their own dates in the past and can say what happened. The responses will go into the information pack; this table is only the calendar as currently mapped.

Two things this table cannot tell you, and which the outreach is meant to: how much attendance actually overlaps between events, and how the communities that have moved dates before were affected when they did.

6. Bird nesting and environmental constraints

Fire is not the only regulated axis. The area holds protected species — notably the lesser kestrel (cernícalo primilla) and Dupont’s lark (alondra ricotí) — whose breeding seasons fall across spring and early summer, and the permitting authority holds a discretionary power to condition or restrict organised events in designated critical areas where they could affect reproduction.

The practical consequence is that moving earlier does not simply trade heat for safety: April to June is the most sensitive part of the wildlife calendar as well as being inside the fire season. We are currently working through the nesting schedules and the mapped protected-area overlaps for both the established site and the proposed new site, which have different exposures and cannot be assumed to behave the same way.

This work is preliminary and unverified. It will form part of the information pack once it is firmer.

• INAGA and bird-nesting periods in Monegros — the current draft research note, with the mapped distances to protected areas for both sites

7. What we do not know yet

An honest list of the gaps, since this page exists to show the work rather than the conclusion:

• The authority’s answer. Candidate windows went in on 5 August; a yes/no per window is expected late September or October, most likely after the vote.
• A defensible 2027 cancellation probability. Four seasons of daily alert data — only two under the current legal regime — are not enough to estimate a reliable annual probability for each week.
• Complete 2026 fire statistics. The latest official statistical bulletin found stops on 14 June. Later daily incident reports cannot safely be added together into an August year-to-date total because incidents can reappear as their status or measured area changes.
• What attendees would actually do. Polling has not yet been run. A window that is legally and environmentally ideal but which most people cannot attend is not a solution.
• What other burns say. Outreach is under way; no responses are reflected here yet.
• Which site. Feasibility work on a possible new site is a separate workstream at an early stage, with a go/no-go requested by 1 December. It interacts with the dates question — the two sites have different environmental exposures and would need separate assessments — but it does not settle it, and the fire regime is not more favourable at the new site.
• Costs of moving. Supplier availability, staff availability, and the commercial effect of a move on ticket sales have not been quantified.

8. 2026 Timeline

• 11 March 2026 Decreto 22/2026 approved in Aragón; published in the BOA (no. 53) on 18 March, three and a half months before the 2026 event.
• 17 June 2026 Meeting with the Comarca de Los Monegros. The comarca reads the new automatic-suspension clause aloud and sets out its evacuation planning.
• Mid-June 2026 Build begins. A fire roughly an hour away burns toward the site; ash falls on the build. It is brought under control. Evacuation plans — buses, receiving villages, Guardia Civil, Cruz Roja — were by this point genuinely in place, not hypothetical.
• 26–28 June 2026 Roja Plus declared — three days, during build.
• 7–12 July 2026 The event runs. The permit holds, nobody is hurt, and there is no full evacuation. Separate Roja Plus declarations apply on 10 July and, during strike, on 12 July, bringing legally binding restrictions on movement, gas cooking and open flame. Ordinary Red alerts continue on many surrounding days.
• 30 July 2026 Community call. The dates question is announced publicly, alongside the note that “the authorities have also strongly recommended scheduling outside the high-fire-risk period, as operational restrictions grow stricter every year.” Minutes.
• 3 August 2026 Board votes to move the General Assembly from 3 to 17 September, specifically to allow more time to prepare the dates decision. Minutes.
• 4 August 2026 Governance working group agrees to prepare a Swiss-style voting booklet for the decision. Minutes.
• 5 August 2026 The candidate-window document goes to the regional authority for assessment. A response is expected around late September or October — i.e. after the vote.
• 2 September 2026 GA agenda fixed.
• 17 September 2026 General Assembly. Members vote.

One consequence of that sequence is worth stating plainly: the authority’s formal yes/no on each candidate window will most likely not be back in time. Whatever members vote on in September will be a decision made under real uncertainty, and the pack should say so rather than pretend otherwise.

9. Where this material comes from

So that the reliability of each part can be judged separately:

• Sections 1 and 8, and the governance detail — published board, community-call and governance working-group minutes, all available on the transparency page.
• Section 2 alert history — every daily NAPIF report published by the Gobierno de Aragón from 1 June to 15 October in 2023, 2024 and 2025, plus 1 June to 22 August 2026, classified for Castejón de Monegros using the official municipality-to-zone assignment. The daily CSV retains a source link for every row.
• Section 2 fire counts and area — the official IAEST table sourced from the Departamento de Medio Ambiente y Turismo. The 2024 and 2025 rows are marked provisional by IAEST.
• Section 3.1–3.6 — the meeting with the Comarca de Los Monegros on 17 June 2026 (Spanish transcript), the published decree, and the official alert reports. Quoted remarks are translations from the June meeting.
• Section 3.7 and section 6 — published regulatory sources (Aragón species catalogues, INAGA resolutions, water-authority rules), researched at the start of August 2026 and not yet reviewed by anyone with formal legal standing.
• Section 4 climate figures — daily Open-Meteo historical reanalysis at the established-site coordinate, calculated over matching calendar weeks in 2006–2025. The derivation is reproducible from the published script and CSV.
• Section 5 — publicly listed dates for other events, compiled by hand and not yet confirmed with the organisers.

None of it has been through legal review. Where a claim matters to how you would vote, follow it to its source and check it — and if you find something wrong, please say so, because it is much cheaper to fix now than after the pack is printed.

10. Taking part

The dates conversation lives in #📆-event-dates on Discord. That is the place to ask a question, challenge something on this page, or say which windows would and would not work for you.

The information pack also needs hands. The named gaps — contacting other events, reviewing the evidence and methodology, formatting the booklet, and running the attendee poll — are all work that can be shared.

• Contacting other burns — Peter K (peter_k_nowhere on Discord) is coordinating this. There are a lot of events to reach and it is the single biggest job; talk to him before starting, so two people don’t write to the same organisers.
• Anything else on the pack — Daniel (@swombat on Discord) or Celine Valerie (celini.valerie on Discord).

If you want to vote, check now that you actually can. Only asociados — members of the association — have a vote at the General Assembly. Log in to humans.nobodies.team and confirm your status shows as asociado. Being on a mailing list, holding a ticket, or having volunteered does not make you one.

If you are not an asociado and you think you qualify, apply — it is what gives you the vote. Applications approved after the assembly is formally called still count for it, so there is time, but the board has to approve each one and that is not instant. Doing it early is better than doing it on 16 September.

• Discord — #📆-event-dates
• Transparency — all board, community and working-group minutes
• Humans — membership
• Working spreadsheet — date options, other burns, reasons