Criminal Lawyers in Arson

Arson is one of the most severely punished offences against collective safety in the Spanish Criminal Code, regulated in Arts. 351-358 CP. The protected legal interest is complex: collective safety against mass risks to life, bodily integrity, property and, in forest fires, natural spaces and ecological balance. Settled Supreme Court case-law defines arson as the intentional or reckless setting of a fire that acquires propagative autonomy and is suitable to endanger life or integrity or cause significant property damage. A small controlled combustion is not enough: the fire must be capable of spreading and producing objective danger.

The Code distinguishes several modalities. Art. 351 CP covers arson with danger to life or integrity, the most serious modality, encompassing fires in inhabited dwellings, public buildings, forests with people present or occupied vehicles. Art. 352 covers forest arson in mountains or wooded masses: aggravated when it affects protected natural spaces, when caused with profit motive or when life is endangered. Art. 353 sets out hyper-aggravated types: devastating fires, those affecting large areas, those causing catastrophic results or those started during natural disasters. Art. 357 regulates arson on one's own goods with intent to defraud insurance or with danger to third parties (frequent in insurance arson). Art. 358 punishes reckless arson, applicable to uncontrolled agricultural burns, candles, cigarette butts or unattended faulty electrical installations.

Penalties are extraordinarily severe. Art. 351 imposes prison from 10 to 20 years when the fire produces real danger to life, with the upper-half range if aggravations concur; where the danger is of lesser degree, the court may impose the penalty one degree below, 5 to 10 years (Art. 351.2 CP). Art. 352 imposes prison from 1 to 5 years for basic forest fires and 3 to 6 years for aggravated ones (protected spaces, profit motive, danger to persons or wide extent). Art. 353 raises the penalty to 3 to 6 years' prison or more in hyper-aggravated circumstances. Art. 358 punishes arson by gross negligence with the penalty one degree below that respectively provided for the arson concerned. Civil liability is usually very high (forest replanting, dwelling damage, firefighting costs and machinery, moral damage), potentially reaching multi-million figures in devastating fires.

Technical defence rests on several consolidated axes. First, the challenge of the forensic report on the fire's origin: review of the focus determination, accelerant analysis by gas chromatography, assessment of short circuits or spontaneous combustion, ruling out fortuitous causes (lightning, self-ignition of organic materials). Second, the absence of intent: when it is evidenced that the origin was accidental or that the conduct was not subjectively apt to start the fire, the intentional offence of Art. 351 falls and only reckless arson of Art. 358 remains (with a radically lower penalty). Third, the absence of concrete danger to life: case-law limits Art. 351 to scenarios where real persons were in the affected area; abstract danger does not suffice. Fourth, the delimitation against Art. 263 CP (criminal damage): if the fire does not propagate autonomously, the correct classification may be the much lighter damages offence.

In current forensic practice we observe a sustained tightening of the judicial response to forest fires, particularly after the major fires along the Mediterranean coast and Galicia, as well as greater sensitivity in insurance-fraud arson scenarios, where insurers and Judicial Police work with increasingly specialised experts (gas chromatography, carbonisation-pattern analysis, digital reconstruction). Organic Law 7/2012 aggravated penalties for forest fires and Organic Law 1/2025 on Justice Service Efficiency has partially reorganised jurisdiction. At Alonso Sala, our criminal lawyers in arson offences intervene from the start of the investigation, articulating proprietary forensic expert evidence (fire experts, chemical experts, electrical experts), challenging Scientific Police and military emergency unit (UME) reports, and building the most efficient defence line: absence of intent, reclassification to the reckless type, atypicality due to lack of concrete danger or legitimate damage reparation. We handle each file with the diligence required in a field where the minimum penalty can reach ten years and where derivative civil liability can be confiscatory.