More than 300,000 evacuated in France and Spain as exhausted firefighters battle bushfires

Firefighters in France and Spain continued to fight raging wildfires which has forced more than 300,000 people to leave these two countries.

Authorities in France’s Gironde region, where the wine region city of Bordeaux is located, issued evacuation orders overnight for five other areas as wind and desert conditions hampered efforts to contain the massive fire. The evacuation operation is now the largest since World War II, authorities said, as more than 250,000 people have been ordered out of the danger zone in one region alone.

“The situation is not very good” regarding the outbreak of fires across France, the country’s Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on Sunday.

“The fire again became extremely strong and unexpectedly, it created its own atmosphere and advanced mysteriously in the area of ​​the city of Bordeaux,” Nunez wrote in X. “There was peace at the end of the night.”

The burned area, mostly of pine forests and dry soil due to the consecutive heat this year, has grown uncontrollably, expanding on Sunday morning to an area of ​​162 square kilometers, the Gironde region said. That is seven times the area of ​​the island of Manhattan and four times the size of Paris.

Firefighters are fighting to reduce the intensity of the fire around Bordeaux, on the ground and in the air, with water jets and fire extinguishers. The military has been called in to bolster the firefighters’ tireless round-the-clock efforts, while other European countries have sent water jets, helicopters and fire engines.

Meanwhile in neighboring Spain, dozens of villages in the wildfire zone west of Madrid were evacuated overnight and a new area opened near the coastal city of Valencia.

“The fire is beyond our power to put it out,” Juanfran Perez Llorca, the president of the Valencia region, told reporters on Saturday, according to AFP.

Pilar Bernabe, the representative of the central government in Valencia, wrote in X that “the night was very intense”.

“The weather is expected to worsen as the day progresses, so these hours have been used to fight the fire,” he said.

In total, the raging fires in Spain this week have forced 116,000 people from their homes.

A wildfire in a canyon in Manises, a suburb of Valencia, that raged for four hours killed one man on Saturday, the local government said, marking the first recorded death in Spain in recent fires.