Inside Portugal's groundbreaking wildfire prevention strategy

It is just after nine in the morning and the dusty track hair-pinning its way up into the mountains of the Serra De Cabrera is deserted.

The air is heavy with heat, but after a week of rain the slopes around us are lush and dotted with wildflowers.

However, there are tell-tale reminders of how fragile this stunning landscape is.

We pass a couple of patches burnt out in the last year or so, the undergrowth beginning to recover, but the trees still blackened stumps.

Portugal has more forest cover than any other country in Europe, but has also been experiencing record temperatures over the past few years.

It is a country that still bears the scars, both physical and psychological, from its worst disaster in decades, back in 2017.

In June of that year, 66 people were killed, some of them burnt alive in their cars, after four deadly wildfires erupted within minutes of each other in central Portugal.

It devastated an area four times the size of Lisbon, destroyed hundreds of homes and redefined the country's approach to firefighting and suppression.

We have come to these mountains to try to find one of the newest weapons being deployed here against the threat of fire.

But we are not searching for cutting-edge tech tucked away in these plateaus. We are looking for the Garrano, a breed of semi-wild horses, that until recently were almost as endangered as the landscape itself.

We are with Jose Luite, a retired vet who has spent his life trying to protect the Garrano, after first riding one as a toddler.

They have been part of this country's heritage since Roman times and there were tens of thousands of them until the late 1990s.

But the mechanisation of farms saw their numbers dwindle until there were just 350 mares left, leaving the Garrano in danger of disappearing, until now.

To learn more, we need to find them.

Jose thinks the horses will have made for the highest plateaus to try to escape the heat, and he's right.

After driving for half an hour, constantly scouring the landscape, we finally spot a flash of black, and six or seven Garrano suddenly gallop out of the trees.

They are beautiful; sleek and muscular, their coal-black coats glinting in the sunlight. Soon adjusting to our presence, they go back to munching their way through the undergrowth.

It's exactly why they're here. They have been reintroduced into this landscape by a project funded by REN - Portugal's biggest electrical infrastructure company.

Between them, the Garrano can get through several tonnes of vegetation a day, much of it below the giant power lines that snake their way up from the damn at the bottom of the valley.

Paulo Camacho, REN's head of public affairs, has joined us to explain more.

He tells me: "We have 10,000 kilometres of lines and 60% of them are in forested areas.

"That's the equivalent of thousands of football pitches of area we have to clear every year to stop fires getting to the lines and for firefighters to get through to fight the fires and to prevent the fires going from one side to the other."

The horses don't only graze under the power lines but they help. And Portugal needs every bit of help it can get.

"When summer arrives we are always waiting to see where the fire is going to break," sighs Paulo. "Because it is going to break, it's always going to break."

Since the tragedy of 2017, the Portuguese government has more than doubled its spending on wildfires. While only a fifth of that funding used to be spent on prevention, now it's nearly half.

Over the course of our week crisscrossing the country, we are shown schemes where villages have begun planting new orange trees, less flammable than the pine and eucalyptus, which up until now had largely replaced them.

We are taken to isolated hamlets, like Mos in the Fafe Mountains, to watch inhabitants taking part in Safe Village drills, where firefighters ask locals to practise evacuating homes, knowing they'll be responsible for holding off any fire until the emergency services can reach them.

We meet helicopter-borne sappers in the north whose job it is to try to contain wildfire ignitions in the first half an hour after an outbreak and visit some of the firefighters.

Many of them are volunteers, stationed at potential hot spots over the summer, along with back up crews from as far afield as Finland and Latvia - part of the European Union's rescue programme.

All of this is coordinated from the National Command Centre, just outside Lisbon, where we are shown the award winning technology that gives fire chiefs a birds-eye view of what's happening on the ground, along with minute by minute predictions of where fire may break out or is likely to behave.

Andre Fernandes, a former geography specialist in his forties, leads Portugal's emergency response and the responsibility of that lies heavily on his shoulders.

While preparing to lead National Command, he spent two years training in firefighting to understand the demands on his crews.

He tells me that during the summer he finds it hard to sleep, waiting at night for his phone to ring with news of another outbreak.

"We will always remember 2017," he says, his face darkening. "That can never happen again. So our daily job, our focus, our objective is to make sure it can't happen again."

He knows Mother Nature is the cruellest of mistresses and can't promise that Portugal is safe.

But the country's pioneering approach seems to be working - despite a warming climate, the number of wildfires here has almost halved since 2017.

But as we fly home, over the dense forests of the Iberian Peninsula, it's the reintroduction of the Garrano that stays with me.

It feels both poetic and practical that Portugal is protecting its future, against possibly the greatest threat it faces, by embracing the best of its past.

You can watch the latest edition of ITV's On Assignment at 11.30pm tonight on ITV1 and ITVX.

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