Climate change, land cover changes, and fuel accumulation are altering the historical fire regimes in Mediterranean fire-prone ecosystems. Understanding the impacts of fire-regime modifications on post-fire recovery/regeneration is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. Within fire perimeters, “fire refugia” i.e. unburned or less severely burned areas, contain residual pre-fire vegetation and facilitate species persistence post-fire. Based on the reconstruction of the 1981 to 2020 fire chronology in a Natura 2000 Network site, within the PRIN 2022 FLER_MeCoFor Project, we identified fire refugia within burned patches of six Pinus halepensis Mill. stands. We used Landsat annual time-series of Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) to assess vegetation recovery temporal trends and pattern, and climate variables which include maximum and minimum temperature (T_max, T_min) and precipitation (P) of four seasons, over the 43 years, to account for climate conditions. To test the influence of climate on NBR, we applied multiple linear regression analysis followed by cross-correlation analysis. Results showed significant increasing vegetation recovery trends for fire refugia of each fire event. Multiple linear regression results indicated that both summer minimum temperature and autumnal precipitation are likely the main drivers of fire refugia recovery. Cross-correlation analysis showed that the recovery trend significantly increased with high T_max of four seasons observed at first positive lags (years), while decreased due to its negative correlation with T_max at last lags. Conversely, for most cases, the minimum temperatures showed weak correlation with NBR, except for the 1982 fire, where a significant positive correlation between spring and summer T_min and vegetation recovery was observed at negative lags. These findings suggest that interannual climate variability may strongly modulate the rate of fire refugia recovery, hence affecting the speed at which these ecosystem legacies can perform important ecological functions in burned areas.