climate change<\/a> is making extreme weather events more frequent and intense. Coming at the height of the summer holiday season, the fires in France and Spain were fuelled by woodland parched to tinder by successive heatwaves and a lack of rain since May.<\/p>\nThe World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said that last month was the hottest June in Western Europe on record and the second-warmest globally.<\/p>\n
France\u2019s fire \u2013 one of the nation\u2019s biggest since World War II \u2013 has produced an unprecedented \u201cpyrocumulonimbus\u201d, a giant fire cloud that creates its own winds and lightning, which in turn spark further blazes, said the National Firefighters Federation of France (FNSPF).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a David-versus-Goliath scenario\u2026 At some point, we\u2019ll find a weak spot and strike there,\u201d said FNSPF spokesman Eric Brocardi.<\/p>\n
French President Emmanuel Macron has called a crisis cabinet meeting for Monday morning to discuss the emergency, his office said.<\/p>\n
Some 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 military personnel and about 1,200 police have been deployed to tackle the blaze in the Gironde region, where the fires are most concentrated. The fires have destroyed at least 240 homes, many of them in the village of Le Porge, and were advancing towards the wine region city of Bordeaux.<\/p>\n
Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave said the fire was \u201cat the gates of the metropolitan area\u201d, about 15km (9 miles) away at its closest point.<\/p>\n
The city, home to 268,000 people, is not currently facing evacuation, Cazenave said.<\/p>\n
The blaze has injured 84 firefighters, 10 of whom have been evacuated, according to the latest situation report, published on Sunday by the prefecture.<\/p>\n
\u2018It looked like the apocalypse\u2019<\/p>\n
Evacuations were also carried out on Sunday in Spain\u2019s Valencia region.<\/p>\n
A man was killed on Saturday in a wildfire in Manises, a Valencia suburb, marking Spain\u2019s first recorded death in the current fires.<\/p>\n
Under the European Union\u2019s civil protection mechanism, Greece and Italy have each sent two Canadair firefighting aircraft to Spain, while Portugal has deployed more than 100 military personnel along with equipment.<\/p>\n
Two more planes will arrive \u201cas soon as possible\u201d from Turkiye, the Spanish Interior Ministry said on X.<\/p>\n
Sanchez, the prime minister, said his government would declare a civil protection emergency on Tuesday for the central provinces hit by the wildfires, unlocking additional recovery funding.<\/p>\n
Weather forecasters warn that another heatwave could hit Europe, with temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius (104F)\u00a0 in some areas, further complicating firefighting efforts.<\/p>\n
Evacuees in both countries have been told they will not be allowed back to their towns and villages until the fires are brought under control.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt looked like the apocalypse. You couldn\u2019t see anything. Everything was covered in ash,\u201d said Rocio Dominguez, who evacuated with her dog, Simba, from Chapineria, west of Madrid.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know when we get to the town if we\u2019ll have half the house burned down or we\u2019ll have it intact, or we won\u2019t have a house. All the clothes, all the memories, everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Italy, too, was facing its own fires.<\/p>\n
More than 400 tourists and beachgoers were evacuated by sea near the town of Peschici in the southern Puglia region, with 300 more expected to be rescued, the coastguard said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wildfires raging in parts of France and Spain have forced more than 325,000 people from their homes, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":828577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5660,6091,295,3456,6816,637,10816,43,44,7413,41,39,42,40,1133],"class_list":["post-828576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-climate-crisis","tag-drought","tag-environment","tag-europe","tag-european-union","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-spain","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=828576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/828577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=828576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=828576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=828576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}