Every region trades one risk for another.

Anyone looking for a second home in southern Europe compares price, view and flight time. Almost nobody compares wildfire, earthquake and flooding, even though European institutes publish those figures openly. We collected them for 195 areas and put them side by side.

The result is not a ranking from safe to unsafe. It is a trade-off. Almost every region scores well on one hazard and badly on another, and which trade-off suits you depends on what you want to do with the house.

The extremes are fifty times apart

Take the Balearic Islands. Seismically they are almost still: around Mahón we measure a peak ground acceleration of 0.011 g. On Lefkada, in Greece, it is 0.563 g. A difference of more than fifty times, within the same kind of Mediterranean holiday market and often within the same price bracket.

Yet the same Balearic Islands fare badly on wildfire: 28 of the 30 areas we measure there fall into the two highest risk classes. Cyprus and Greece, the two regions with by far the heaviest earthquake hazard, have the lowest wildfire risk of all nine.

The bar shows earthquake hazard only. Fire and heat sit on different scales and so do not belong on the same axis; read those as figures. Fire runs from 0 to 1, heat is the number of days a year above 35°C.

Lake Como stands out as the only region with zero heat days. Cyprus has eleven, the Algarve eight. For anyone planning to spend the whole summer there rather than two weeks in May, that is a different kind of number than it looks.

Flooding we can only test in one country

Spain publishes, point by point, which flood zone a location falls in, with the return period attached: once in ten, a hundred or five hundred years. Of the 203 Spanish properties we tested, 56 fall in the shortest return period, almost all of them in the same strip along the Segura river in the province of Alicante.

That comes with a limitation. For those properties we know the location at town level, not plot level. It is a signal that something needs checking, not a verdict on that particular house; we only do the plot-level check in a full property report. And Portugal, France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus have no such national register, so for those countries we show a dash instead of a figure.

Why this matters to you

None of these figures says you should not buy somewhere. They do tell you what to look into before you sign. A villa on the Balearic Islands calls for a conversation about firebreaks, vegetation and insurability. A villa on Cyprus or in Greece calls for a structural engineer’s view of the building. Those are different questions for different advisers, and which one you need to ask depends on a number that appears in no brochure.

How to read this. For each region, the average across all the areas we measure there; the number of areas differs by region and is shown in the tooltip. An average hides outliers, so a favourable regional figure does not mean every property within it scores well.

Source. Earthquake hazard from ESHM20, the European seismic hazard model, as peak ground acceleration at a 475-year return period. Wildfire risk from EFFIS, the European Forest Fire Information System. Heat days from Open-Meteo, based on ERA5. Flooding from SNCZI, the Spanish national flood zone mapping system of MITECO. All four are public and free to consult. Our own dataset, 195 areas, 7 September 2026.