Canadian authorities on Friday advised residents of Toronto, Canada's most populous city, to stay home and warned that poor air quality from smoke from wildfires ravaging the country poses a “high risk” to your health.

The Canadian Meteorological Service said Friday that Toronto's air quality is among the worst in the world and recommended that outdoor activities be limited or cancelled.

In addition, smoke causes reduced visibility throughout the city, in which more than 2.6 million people live, although with its metropolitan area, which includes several dormitory towns, this figure rises to approximately 6 million inhabitants, or one seventh of the population of Canada.

Meteorologists also predicted that Starting Saturday, in addition to the smoke, much of the province of Ontario, where Toronto is located, will experience high temperatures reaching 35 degrees.

In the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and Montreal, the country's second most populous city, the health risk is also high due to poor air quality.

The CIFFC, the agency coordinating the response to wildfires in Canada, said on Friday that There are 500 active fires in the country and this year the flames have already consumed 81,000 square kilometres of forest, the highest number in the country's modern history and equivalent to the size of Austria.

The conditions have forced some localities to cancel the traditional fireworks displays that are part of the July 1 celebrations, the national holiday, and replace them in the sky with lights from drones.

This Friday, Quebec has seen 102 active wildfires, responsible for spreading smoke to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, as well as much of the eastern United States and even southern Europe.

This Friday, Canadian authorities announced the arrival of 151 South Korean firefighters to help put out the fires in Quebec.

The South Korean firefighters will replace 100 Spaniards who completed a two-week mission in Quebec on Thursday. The Spanish personnel were part of a European contingent, which also included firefighters from Portugal and France, who responded to Canada's request for help from the European Union (EU) for the first time this year.

The Spanish ambassador to Canada, Alfredo Martínez Serrano, who traveled to Quebec on Thursday to say goodbye to the Spanish contingent, stressed that the presence of the 100 Spanish firefighters “is an important step.” and recalled that since the seventies of the twentieth century, firefighting efforts in Spain have been carried out with the help of Canadian amphibious aircraft.

Spanish firefighters told EFE that the scale of the forest fires in Canada is something they have never faced before, with uncontrollable fires that will last for months.

In British Columbia, in western Canada, the largest fire in the province's history already exceeds 5,745 square kilometres of burned area, an area larger than the community of Cantabria in Spain.

Provincial officials have said they cannot fight the Donnie Creek fire and will have to wait for the flames to die down naturally in the winter as rain and snow arrive in the area.

In total, nearly 1,500 firefighters from Australia, Chile, Costa Rica, Spain, the United States, France, Mexico, New Zealand and Portugal have come to Canada this year to collaborate in the tasks of extinguishing forest fires in the face of the historic wave of fires, reports Efe.