Madrid, June 23, 2026 (Lusa) - The podcast “País de incendiários” (country of arsonists), produced by the Portuguese magazine Divergente and created by Sofia da Palma Rodrigues and Manuel Bivar, has been awarded one of the 2025/2026 King of Spain International Journalism Awards in Madrid.
The digital magazine Divergente was honoured, on Monday, in the Environment category of these awards, which have been presented annually since 1983 to journalistic works from Ibero-American countries, in Spanish and Portuguese.
The podcast “País de Incendiários”, according to the authors, travelled across Portugal, “the country that burns the most in the European Union”, to try to understand “what drives a person to leave their home and, for no apparent reason, set fire to everything around them”, emphasising that “the main cause” of the wildfires in the country “is arson”.
“We tell the story of a country that has abandoned much of its territory and its population. And we paint a picture in which nobody comes out looking good,” say the authors in their presentation of the work.
The jury highlighted that the podcast explores the subject of the fires in great depth, in a work of “constant relevance”, with a script and delivery “that captivates” the listener, following a journey across Portugal to attempt to paint a portrait of the arsonist and analyse the structural causes of the fires, the impact of climate change, and issues such as mental health, alcoholism and rebellion against the system.
Speaking to Lusa in Madrid, after receiving the award from the King of Spain, Sofia da Palma Rodrigues emphasised the importance of such an accolade for the sustainability and visibility of Divergente, a “small project dedicated to independent and slow journalism”, which devotes “the time needed to listen to people” in order to tell the stories it sets out to tell.
Alongside Divergente, works by international media outlets of the calibre and stature of newspapers such as El País and The Washington Post were also recognised.
The King of Spain International Journalism Awards are organised by the Spanish news agency EFE and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).
The jury for the 43rd edition recognised entries in six categories and awarded the Environment prize to “País de incendiários”, for which 60 entries were submitted.
Another of this year’s winners was the Brazilian digital media outlet “Aos Factos”, which won in the Ibero-American Media category.
It is a fact-checking platform and was recognised for defending the truth in an age of digital manipulation, having already succeeded in having misleading posts removed from the social media platform TikTok and videos which sexualised teenagers removed from Meta.
The 2025/2026 King of Spain International Journalism Awards recognised four further entries in the categories of Narrative Journalism; International Cooperation and Humanitarian Action; Culture; and Photography.
The Narrative Journalism prize went to Cadena SER’s podcast ‘Assistolia, Death from Within’, coordinated by journalists Aimar Bretos and Víctor Olazábal.
The investigative team from Mexico’s El Universal won in the International Cooperation and Humanitarian Action category with a piece on the drowning deaths of migrants attempting to reach the US via the Rio Grande, produced in collaboration with the journalism platform Lighthouse Reports and the US newspaper The Washington Post.
In the Culture category, the winner was the Honduran magazine Contracultura, which, as the jury highlighted, made the leap to print “in the age of AI [Artificial Intelligence]” whilst offering a diverse range of topics and artistic expressions.
The prize in the Photography category went to Óscar Corral, for an image published in the Spanish newspaper El País, taken in a town in Valencia, Spain, during the floods of October 2024, in which more than 230 people died.
The prizes – each worth €10,000 per category – were presented by King Felipe VI of Spain at a ceremony at Casa América in Madrid.
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