This investigation started at the end of the summer in 2023, on the banks of the Sever River, as we looked over at the recently burned hillside by the Marvão Castle in Alentejo. When we heard the rumours of arson that were doing the rounds up and down the water’s edge, this question came to us: “What drives someone to leave their home and set fire to everything around them?”

In our preliminary research, we started to read news published about arson. We found 289 news items that talked about arsonists, published between 2015 and 2023 in the Correio da Manhã—the newspaper that covers the subject most extensively. But we didn’t find a single life history or in-depth report. Most of the time, all you could read were copies of the press releases made by the Judicial Police when they catch and detain someone; or editorials or opinion pieces calling for harsher sentences for those accused of arson. In other media, the subject was avoided completely. They focused mainly on the structural causes that, year after year, cause the country to burn: poor land management, fractured firefighting efforts, climate change, the abandonment of the interior, depopulation and eucalyptus monoculture.

But if in the last decade 600 arsonists have been added to the Judicial Police database, this is a sign that something is up. When we started this project, we had a theory: arson occurs not as a result of an isolated criminal daydream, with no apparent motive. Arson is also a structural cause of wildfires. A structural cause that involves mental illness, alcoholism, abandonment, misery, anger and resentment against the system.

Who are these people? What life do they lead? Where do they live? What were their motives? Arsonist Country is the result of a series of questions to which we tried to find answers, travelling the length of Portugal over the period of two years to do so.

Before starting interviews, we decided to analyse the official figures about arson that are published every year at the Portuguese Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF). The first reports we read indicated that Portugal was the country most affected by wildfires in the European Union, and that the main cause were small acts of carelessness when burning vegetation waste.

But after days looking into the Excel table where all the data about fires in Portugal are shared—date, time, place, motivation, hectares burned—we concluded that, in Portugal, arson was the main cause of area burned. And this was an unexpected discovery.

With this information, we decided to speak to the people publishing the statistics and with those responsible for firefighting measures. Together with these institutions, we got an understanding of how little is being done to stop arson. Despite clarity on the numbers—published annually by these very institutions—we found they all dismissed the phenomenon. As if arson was irrelevant. It seemed to be a taboo, too complex for anyone to want to deal with it.

From the outset, what we really wanted to get out of the investigation was to speak with arsonists. We didn’t know where to start but, at some point, we remembered going to the courts to read up about the cases of people accused of arson. The majority were sentenced to paying fines, because of small burns that had got out of control. But there were also stories of those who had set fires for other, less easily explainable, reasons.

Our strategy worked, we managed to get the addresses of these people and get to talk to the arsonists who we interviewed for this investigation. The only caveat being that we have only spoken to those who were tried in court.

We wanted to hear the stories of as many people as possible, from different regions throughout the country. To paint a polyphonic portrait and not just focus on one particular case. Doing this was a lot easier than we had imagined at the beginning—we found people willing to talk all over the place. This surprised us, it seemed like they were just waiting for someone willing to listen to appear.

Right from the first interviews, we knew that we would not share the names of the people accused of arson, nor the places where they live, or the places where we talked to them. We felt that to do so could put the people who agreed to trust us with their stories, and who were extremely vulnerable, at risk. The only references we make to names of arsonists are those whose cases are well-known and have already been widely shared in the press.