Since the adoption of European Union Council Directive 92/43 on the conservation of natural habitats and wild fauna and flora, some opposition has arisen among owners and managers of land affected by the directive. Some studies have indicated that some of this opposition has found expression in subsequent arson fires in these areas. This article analyses the occurrence of arson fires in the SACs (Special Areas of Conservation) included in the European ecological network, Natura 2000, in Galicia (Spain), more specifically in the montes vecinales en mano común (MVMCs), which are privately owned collective lands. We tested whether the declaration of SACs had a statistical impact on the forest fire regime in the period 1999–2014. The analyses focused on the sub-periods of 1999–2004 and 2005–2014, i.e., before and after the approval of the list of sites of community importance in the study area in December 2004. The results obtained show that, after the declaration of protection, there was a statistically significant increase in the area burnt by fire in these areas, mainly on private estates. We also found that the percentage of arson fires after 2004 was higher in SACs than in other territorial units. We found that the percentage of arson fires was reduced less in SACs than in other territorial units. Furthermore, we found that the area burnt per fire after 2004 in SACs was almost double that in the MVMC-SACs (12.04 ha versus 6.64 ha), so it can be concluded that the conservationist policies of the Natura 2000 network in Galicia have not had a positive effect on the forest fire regime.

In the scientific literature, numerous different analyses have been reported on forest fires, in a constant effort to predict their behavior and occurrence. It is known that a variety of factors come together in these events: climatic, physiographic, socioeconomic and territorial, among others. However, although forest fires have a significant relationship with social conflict, this aspect has not been sufficiently studied. This aspect is particularly important in regions such as Galicia (Northwest Spain), where forest fires, either intentional or related to human activity, account for up to 95% of the total annual number of fires. As a measure of this social conflict, in this article, we compile the court sentences and newspaper reports, in which the montes vecinales en mano común VMC) of Galicia (a special type of property and tenure right) have been involved, which allows us to elaborate a chromatic coding that relates the three factors and allows us to detect spatio-temporal patterns. The resulting coding is a grid made up of 3034 rows and 15 columns, in which the color of each cell indicates the relationship between fires, newspaper reports, and court rulings. This coding also makes it possible to detect differences between the geographical sectors considered, which helps to detect spatio-temporal patterns and facilitates the implementation of specific prevention policies for each geographical sector.