Firefighters battle the blaze using a water truck near the village of Le Porge in south-western France. Photograph: Romain Perrocheau/AFP/Getty
France asks EU for help while Spain declares national emergency around Madrid, as marine heatwave sees parts of Mediterranean Sea 5C hotter than normal
Brutal heat torching southern Europe has forced about 30,000 people to flee wildfires in France and Spain as a marine heatwave scalds the Mediterranean and researchers warn that “Dantesque” scenarios cannot be ruled out as infernos worsen.
France has requested assistance from the European Union to help it deal with a major wildfire near the country’s Atlantic coast, while Spain has declared a national emergency in the Madrid region and in the province of Avila, because of several wildfires burning out of control.
President Emmanuel Macron on Friday wrote on X that the situation remained “extremely tense” with the fires particularly bad in Gironde in southwestern France.
“France has requested the activation of the European Union’s civil protection mechanism. We will soon be able to count on reinforcements from two Croatian Canadair aircraft, two Portuguese Air Tractor planes, as well as two heavy Black Hawk helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” he said.
The fire on France’s Atlantic coast prompted the evacuation of more than 18,800 people, including thousands of tourists from campsites and holiday homes, as firefighters struggled to control the blaze.
Thousands evacuated in south of France as wildfire rages across pine forest – video
Spain late Thursday declared a national emergency in the Madrid region and in the province of Avila, near the capital, in the wake of several wildfires burning out of control.
Around the Madrid region, the fires have forced the evacuation of 10,000 people, placing the response to the crisis in the hands of a military emergency unit.
“The government has deployed every available resource to stop the terrible fires currently affecting numerous areas: Avila, Leon, Toledo, Madrid and other parts of Spain,” prime minister Pedro Sánchez said earlier on X, urging the public to exercise “great caution” and heed instructions from authorities.
Almost 125,000 hectares have already burnt in Spain this year compared with 393,000 for the whole of last year, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.
Extreme highs of 44.7C were recorded on Thursday in Cieza, in the Spanish province of Murcia, according to Aemet, the Spanish meteorological agency. The previous day, the Spanish cities of Albacete, Ávila and Teruel broke their July temperatures records with heat as high as 42C.
A marine heatwave is affecting 80% of the Mediterranean Sea’s surface area, according to the Mediterranean Monitoring System. Daily temperatures on Tuesday had reached “extreme” levels in several parts, with some anomalies 5C hotter than the average from 1991 to 2020.
The severity of fires in the EU has broken records for this time of year, data from the European Forest Fire Information System showed on Wednesday, and about twice as much land had burned by 22 July than the average for that date over the last two decades. France has broken records for the area burned; it and Spain have broken records for the number of fires.
People look at the sky illuminated by wildfires in Le Porge, south-west France, on Thursday. Photograph: Romain Perrocheau/AFP/Getty
A man rests with his dog in a community hall on a camp bed in Le Porge. Photograph: Romain Perrocheau/AFP/Getty
The fire in France began in a dense pine forest near the village of Saumos about 40km (25 miles) west of Bordeaux and just north of the bay of Arcachon, a popular tourist destination. It had burned more than 3,700 hectares (9,140 acres) in a little over 24 hours, firefighters said on Thursday.
No casualties had been reported but several houses had succumbed to the flames, they said. The Gironde prefecture said that while 800 firefighters and four water-bombing planes were battling to bring the fire under control, the situation remained “unfavourable” and the blaze was not yet stabilised.
“The fire is highly erratic and gaining very significant force,” said Marc Vermeulen, the regional fire service chief, on Thursday evening. “One of the main fronts is very close to a semi-urban area. We are defending house by house.”
France has endured three almost back-to-back heatwaves since May as climate breakdown leads to more frequent and extreme weather events causing thousands of excess deaths, evaporating soils and waterways and fuelling wildfires.
Patrick Martineau, 69, who was evacuated from the village of Le Porge, told Agence France-Presse that police had “come banging on the doors … It’s scary – hard to take in. When we bought a home here, we never thought there’d be a fire risk.”
Smoke rising from the wildfire in Saumos is photographed from Arès on Wednesday. Photograph: Romain Perrocheau/AFP/Getty
Sylvie, a holidaymaker from Paris staying in the relatively more built-up area of Lège-Cap-Ferret, said a neighbour had told her: “‘Get your bags ready, we’re going to be evacuated during the night.’ We put the bulk of our stuff in the car boot and left.”
Elke Urbain, from Antwerp in Belgium, who holidays in the area every year, said she was advised while she was on the beach on Wednesday afternoon to “go back immediately to the campsite and gather your things. It’s just terribly sad.”
In 2022, a wildfire burned more than 30,000 hectares in the same area, forcing about 50,000 people to be evacuated. In tinder-dry conditions and fanned by a strong wind, the latest blaze has torn through the forest, with flames reaching 10 metres high.
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Jean-Luc Helias, 54, from Le Porge, said he and his family had lived through that fire four years ago and “the firefighters do an amazing job to protect people’s homes. All that matters to me is that my family is safe; the rest is just material possessions.”
Nine municipalities have opened reception centres for evacuees and were sheltering more than 2,500 people, the prefecture said. About 8,800 people were evacuated during the day on Thursday, 10,000 overnight.
Numerous roads in the area, including those leading to the Cap Ferret peninsula a few kilometres to the south – home to the villas of celebrities and millionaires and one of France’s most exclusive holiday spots – were closed to all but essential traffic.
A house in Cotignac, another village close to Pontevès, is consumed by fire on Wednesday night. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty
A helicopter drops water over a burning area as a wildfire flares up again in Pontevès in south-eastern France on Wednesday. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty
Police have opened an investigation into the causes of the wildfire, which the mayor of Le Porge, Martial Zaninetti, said on Wednesday appeared to have been started by a machine that was clearing undergrowth.
A fortnight ago, flames devastated a 10th of the Unesco-listed Fontainebleau forest outside Paris in a rare wildfire so far north. France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has said more than 12,500 wildfires had broken out since the beginning of the year.
In Spain, authorities on Thursday ordered 3,500 people in a town west of Madrid to leave their homes because of a forest fire burning out of control.
The emergency services said on X evacuation messages had been sent to people in Aldea de Fresno, about 60 kilometres (38 miles) south-west of Madrid.
A fire that has burned 32,000 hectares in the province of Guadalajara, north of the capital, was described as stable.
Spanish wildfire scientists said they were not surprised by the extreme figures as the abandonment of rural land had left more overgrown vegetation and the rise in temperatures from climate breakdown made it easier for such plant matter to dry out and burn.
Víctor Resco de Dios, a professor of forestry engineering and global change at the University of Lleida, said: “Although it’s difficult to predict how far things might go, we will soon be unable to rule out Dantesque scenarios like those seen in California or Australia, with fires or fire complexes reaching hundreds of thousands of hectares or even a million hectares.”
The marine heatwave in the Mediterranean is projected to shrink but stay strong from Sardinia to Greece, according to a forecast for Saturday from Mercator Ocean. From Gibraltar to the Balearic Islands, strong heat is expected to drop to moderate levels, despite intensifying locally in the Alboran Sea.
Western Europe has been rocked by repeated heatwaves this summer, with extreme highs in June that scientists expect will have killed tens of thousands of people as hot days push bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevent them from resting.
On Wednesday, an analysis estimated the cost of the June heatwave to the continent’s grain farmers at €2bn (£1.7bn) in lost revenue from 9m tonnes of destroyed crops. On Thursday, scientists found climate breakdown had contributed to drought conditions, making levels of soil dryness five times more likely in western Europe and 11 times more likely in eastern Europe.
