Wildfires force mass evacuations across France and Spain

Wildfires forced more than 220,000 people to evacuate across France and Spain as flames ripped through Gironde, Landes and areas west of Madrid, where officials said one blaze had gone beyond firefighters’ capacity to contain. French President Emmanuel Macron called a crisis cabinet meeting and France sought emergency help from the European Union as extreme heat, strong winds and drought fed the fires.

In south-west France, around 200,000 people were evacuated from Gironde and Landes, two regions where the fires spread fast through dry woodland and towns near Bordeaux. The evacuations came as the summer heat intensified pressure on local fire crews and emergency planners, with later estimates pushing the number of displaced people across both countries above 250,000 and then above 300,000.

Spain faced its own fast-moving emergency near the capital. Three fires west of Madrid merged into a larger blaze, and Spanish officials said the fire near the city was “beyond the capacity” of firefighters to contain. The first fatality in the Spanish fires was a man believed to be in his 70s, found in a car near Valencia.

The scale of the evacuations has made the fires one of the most disruptive summer emergencies in recent European years. Emergency services in both countries were forced to move residents quickly as heat, wind and dry ground turned separate outbreaks into sprawling fire fronts, while France’s appeal for European Union assistance signaled how widely the strain had spread.

The fires also underscored how quickly summer travel and daily life can be overturned when heat waves converge with drought. With homes emptied, roads cleared and crews stretched across multiple regions, the blazes in France and Spain became a stark measure of how severe fire seasons in Europe have become.