More than 325,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in France and Spain as wildfires tear through southwestern Europe, with some of the worst fires in France since World War II burning along the country's southern Atlantic coast.
In France, at least 84 firefighters have been injured, more than 200 homes destroyed, and more than 220,000 people forced to evacuate. That is more than five times as many evacuations as the last major French wildfire, which hit the same region four years ago. More than 2,500 firefighters are battling the largest wildfire to hit the country this year. Officials say the fire has grown so large it has started generating its own wind and fire storms. France's Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on Sunday that about 115,000 hectares have burned in France since the start of the year, according to Al Jazeera.
Thomas Cazenave, the mayor of Bordeaux, said the fire came within about 9 miles of the wine-growing region's metropolitan areas over the weekend, and 15 to 19 miles from the city itself. About 25 miles south, down the coast, a second fire sparked by a burning van on a country road forced another 30,000 people to flee the town of Biscarrosse, including residents of a nursing home and a children's summer camp.
One American family became trapped in the chaos. Rebecca Papin, from Franklin, Tennessee, was vacationing in Biscarrosse with her two children, Violet, 9, and Louie, 11. French authorities had ordered residents to evacuate on Thursday, but Papin missed the alert. "On Thursday night, when I put the children down around 11 o'clock to go to sleep, it was such an unstable situation that I thought the next day anything could happen, and that I must get at least a couple of hours of sleep," Papin told CBS News. "I'm a very light sleeper. So I always sleep with earplugs in, and because of that, I missed the evacuation when they went throughout the city."
By Friday morning, every car on her street was gone. A police officer came to her door and told her she was not allowed to leave. The supermarket opened for a few hours on Sunday. "When I went to the supermarket, it was only me and the soldiers in their combat clothing and camouflage," she said. "I felt strange seeing the soldiers in the grocery store. It felt like being in a film."
The situation is no better across the border. In Spain, the government declared a national emergency on July 24 after two major blazes were described by authorities as out of control. One fire west of Madrid has become the largest in the country's recent history. Another near Valencia on Spain's Mediterranean coast killed a 78-year-old man. A separate blaze in Spain's eastern Castellon province ravaged more than 4,300 hectares over the weekend and entered the Sierra de Espadan natural park, which contains large forests of pine trees and cork oaks.
"The fire is out of control, it's very difficult to extinguish from a technical standpoint, especially because of the adverse weather conditions that will continue throughout the day," the regional leader of Valencia, Juanfran Perez, told reporters near the site.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said more than 150,000 hectares have burned across Spain since January, six times the area destroyed during the same period last year. In Spain, about 75,000 people have been evacuated, with around 30,000 others ordered to shelter in place. European scientists say heat and drought are fueling the blazes, which come after Western Europe recorded its hottest June. Wildfires destroyed 2.2 million hectares of land across Europe in 2025, up from 1.4 million hectares in 2022, according to the United Nations. A new heat wave is forecast for the region in the days ahead.
