{"id":710783,"date":"2026-07-25T16:54:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T16:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/710783\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T16:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T16:54:09","slug":"more-than-250000-people-flee-wildfires-in-france-and-spain-wildfires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/710783\/","title":{"rendered":"More than 250,000 people flee wildfires in France and Spain | Wildfires"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unrestrained wildfires in Spain and France<\/a> have forced more than 250,000 people to flee, authorities from both countries have said, as they struggle to contain the blazes.<\/p>\n

About 70,000 people were evacuated from central Spain<\/a>, while 197,000 people fled in France, including tens of thousands from the wine region city of Bordeaux.<\/p>\n

Spain declared a national emergency over the fires, the first time the country has ever done so over a wildfire. France\u2019s evacuations constituted \u201cprobably\u201d the biggest peacetime evacuation the country has ever seen, its interior minister said.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of firefighters have worked to contain the blazes, which have been fuelled by persistent heatwaves and the climate crisis, but were still unable to stop their advance. In Spain, high winds were exacerbating the fires, and two of the three blazes merged on Friday.<\/p>\n

France\u2019s interior minister, Laurent Nu\u00f1ez, said a huge military cargo plane, the Airbus A400M Atlas, was being deployed to join 18 other aircraft in the \u201clong and very difficult\u201d battle against wildfires in the Gironde region of south-western France.<\/p>\n

\"FirefightersFirefighters in Spain and France battle raging wildfires \u2013 video<\/p>\n

The French government has called in the military to help, deploying 1,500 soldiers, and has rushed 1.5m face masks to help protect people from smoke inhalation. Fire crews have also been digging trenches, as well as using retardants, as winds were forecast to push the fires closer to Bordeaux. Wildfires<\/a> were reported to be about 20 miles west of the city.<\/p>\n

The French government ordered people in the path of the fire to evacuate, including people from Bordeaux\u2019s western suburbs. Police went door to door to tell people to leave, with scenes of panic unfolding as residents fled their homes under a sky darkened by smoke.<\/p>\n

The Gironde regional prefect, Sophie Brocas, said on Friday that strong winds were driving the fire towards the Bordeaux metro area and that it had grown to \u201can unprecedented magnitude\u201d.<\/p>\n

People who have been evacuated from their homes in the Bordeaux-Lac exhibition centre, which has been turned into a shelter for people displaced by wildfires. Photograph: Manon Cruz\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Officials said the sudden blazes caught residents and authorities off guard. In France, people had to flee by boat when the flames headed towards towns on the coast.<\/p>\n

The French prime minister, S\u00e9bastien Lecornu, said the fire in Gironde was so strong that it had begun generating its own winds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fires that are hitting our country have reached a level that has never been seen before,\u201d he wrote on X. \u201cOur priority is clear: protecting human lives.\u201d He urged people to obey evacuation orders \u201cwithout delay\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Spanish health minister instructed people in Madrid not to go outside over concern of the poor air quality from smoke.<\/p>\n

\u201cAvoid physical activity and staying outdoors. If you go outdoors and there is smoke or ash, use a mask,\u201d Monica Garcia said on X.<\/p>\n

Firefighters on a support line between the villages of Lacanau and Saint-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne in the Bordeaux region. Photograph: Astrid Lagougne\/EPA<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want everyone to be quickly brought to safety. We must act quickly together,\u201d Brocas said.<\/p>\n

The long, back-to-back heatwaves in Europe<\/a> have dried forests out, turning them into tinder for wildfires. Fires had already consumed 130,000 hectares (321,000 acres) of forest this year in Spain, about a third higher than the country\u2019s annual average, Spain\u2019s prime minister, Pedro S\u00e1nchez, said on Saturday.<\/p>\n

In France, fires burned down more than 98,000 hectares (242,000 acres), which France\u2019s interior minister said was a \u201chistoric record\u201d.<\/p>\n

Scientists say climate breakdown is triggering more frequent and more extreme weather events, evaporating soils and waterways, fuelling wildfires and leading to thousands of excess deaths<\/a>. Europe is heating at about twice the global average rate.<\/p>\n

S\u00e1nchez said that cooler weather on Saturday gave a \u201cwindow of opportunity\u201d for firefighters to help contain the blazes. \u201cWe 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,\u201d S\u00e1nchez added.<\/p>\n

Other European countries were helping both countries fight the blazes, with Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovakia sending aid and water-dumping aircraft to Spain and France.<\/p>\n

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, promised more help was on the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cEurope stands alongside France and Spain in the face of the devastating wildfires ravaging them. Five planes and two helicopters from the rescue fleet are now deployed in France and four planes are arriving in Spain today,\u201d von der Leyen said in a post on X.<\/p>\n

On Saturday evening, Spain\u2019s interior ministry said a man had died in a fire in Manises, in Valencia. He had been found in a car in a ravine, officials said.<\/p>\n

The fire was a separate incident from the major blazes raging west of Madrid, which have so far not caused any reported deaths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unrestrained wildfires in Spain and France have forced more than 250,000 people to flee, authorities from both countries…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-710783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}