Unchecked wildfires raging Saturday in France’s southwest and near Spain’s capital Madrid have forced 267,000 people to flee and prompted Paris to deploy its military.
France hustled 197,000 people from areas around Bordeaux — including vacation spots crowded this time of year — in what was “probably” the biggest peacetime evacuation the country has seen, its Interior Minister said.
In Spain, where 70,000 people were evacuated from villages west of Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the priority was “to save lives” as he visited the fire zone.
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The sky over Madrid was covered by a haze of brown-grey smoke and thick black ash coated roof terraces in the centre north of the city, AFP journalists saw. Residents forced to keep their windows closed by the smell of throat-irritating smoke.
Jacqueline Villafranca, a 38-year-old originally from Peru who evacuated to Madrid on Friday with her husband and their two daughters, said that when smoke filled her village of Navalagamella “I thought everything was going to burn, the house and everything”.
“Here you can breathe normally — yesterday it was unbearable,” she said, sitting in a gymnasium-turned-shelter.
Overstretched firefighters in Spain and France battling around the clock for days have been unable to contain the infernos, though authorities in both countries suggested the intensity of some of the blazes had notched down.
So far, no deaths have been reported in the civilian population, but two French firefighters died earlier this week near Bordeaux.
France’s interior minister, Laurent Nunez, said the wildfire in the Gironde region where Bordeaux is located “was less intense last night than we feared” and was no longer a “convective” type of fire that self-fuels through rising currents.
The government delegation in Madrid also said on X early Saturday that overnight conditions had “greatly aided the fight against the wildfires, which advanced little and decreased in intensity”.
But the battles were far from won.
Spain’s Sánchez warned: “We are going to have some complex hours ahead because although the temperatures have gone down, we do not know exactly how the wind will develop, how strong it will be.”
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Tinderbox conditions
The fires in Spain and France advanced quickly because of tinderbox conditions worsened by successive heatwaves the two countries have experienced since May.
Scientists say global warming is increasing droughts and causing weather emergencies to become more extreme and more frequent. Europe is the fastest-warming continent due to climate change.
Both countries were receiving EU help in the form of firefighting aircraft from other European countries.
France has deployed 1,000 soldiers to help firefighters near Bordeaux, and on Saturday the government ordered an A400M military transport aircraft modified to release up to 20 tonnes of fire retardant to join the fleet of smaller planes already dousing flames.
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu called a new government crisis meeting on the wildfires for later Saturday, just one day after chairing a previous one.
The head of the Paris fire brigade told AFP that 100 firefighters from the French capital were also being deployed to help in the southwest, adding to 45 firefighters and six vehicles already sent there.
Emergency shelters were set up in schools and gymnasiums in southwestern France for tourists and residents left wondering what they would return to.
Nuala Kelly, a 75-year-old Irish tourist, said she had never seen anything like this.
“Never, never, never, never, never, and I’ve travelled all over the world and been in all sorts of situations,” she told AFP at Bordeaux’s vast exhibition centre now housing thousands of people.
Olivier Stewart, a 38-year-old Frenchman who had to leave the village of Merignac with his wife and young children, said the children were “the most stressed”.
“They think the fire is going to burn down the house, but we’re coping,” he said.
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‘Record’ area burnt
The massive smoke clouds thrown up by the French and Spanish fires were starting to connect in the atmosphere, according to satellite images from Spain’s Aemet weather agency.
Fires currently raging across France, including those in the southwest, have burned nearly 98,000 hectares (242,000 acres) — a “historic record”, Nunez said.
In the southwest alone, the flames have consumed more than 32,000 hectares — three times the surface area of Paris — and destroyed at least 100 buildings, authorities said.
The blazes west of Madrid have burned up to 25,000 hectares, according to Spain’s interior ministry.
Two of the three major wildfires there have merged into one, and are threatening to join up to form a massive inferno just kilometres from the capital.
The Spanish government’s delegate in Madrid, Francisco Martin, on Saturday warned that “erratic gusts” were making the fight difficult, but he expressed optimism that a dip in temperatures offered “a real opportunity”.
