What is ‘superadobe’?

If the fire was hot enough to consume these, or if roofing caught fire and then it burned 'down' It may well be the fire was un-survivable for almost any form of construction except steel and concrete.

What was your roof? How big were your eaves, and how close was the surrounding bushland and trees, which I assume (since its portugal, and they planted a french metric tonne of eucalypts, which is a very very hot fast fire) was the primary risk?

Did you try and 'stay and fight' or evacuate? Here in Australia its a high risk decision: Stay and die, or leave and lose the lot but some people stay and survive at significant personal risk, designs are out there to provide shelter, and techniques in hazard reduction but if the fire is big enough, you lose.

I think this form of building remains interesting because of the thermal store and low(ish) cost but I am now thinking about what you say, because I really thought it had more fire survivability than you seem to be suggesting.

> 1)no structural integrity to the actual fill of the bags, unless you add cement, in which case why are you building with earth bags?

Because earth bags (or sand bags) are cheap and you can start building your structure in small increments immediately. There's no need for constructing forms, and you can mix stabilized earth in small batches. We're in the desert, so the fill was pretty ideal and didn't require much cement to stabilize.

My friends have their share of earthbag structure complaints but they're more focused on how laborious and time-consuming the process is, and the cost of protecting the exterior with something like stucco which you then can't really put loads on (like climbing/walking) without cracking.

They've since moved on to only making earthdomes below grade, where it's naturally cooler (desert) and you don't have to deal with an exterior finish like stucco, as it's all buried underground.