France has evacuated over 250,000 people, including about 220,000 from the Gironde region in the southwest, where a fire has burned 42,000 hectares. President Emmanuel Macron, who traveled to Gironde on Monday, said the fires were the worst the country has faced since World War Two.
Sophie Brocas, head of the Gironde prefecture, said the blaze was "unprecedented" and did not "develop according to known logic", instead generating its own wind and forcing authorities to continually adapt. Bordeaux prosecutor Renaud Gaudeul said the fire likely started accidentally after workers used a strimmer while clearing vegetation near a high-voltage power line, adding that initial findings showed no breach of safety rules.
Spain is also battling blazes, with more than 90,000 people evacuated from the country's central region. Fires have burned roughly 77,000 hectares burned in the Madrid region and the provinces of Avila and Toledo, prompting authorities to suspend harvest work requiring farm machinery for the duration of the fire emergency.
In the Valencia region's Castellon province, an uncontrolled fire has burned over 7,000 hectares and hit some 80,000 residents in 19 towns, while Andalusia's Huelva province saw its sixth blaze in a week ignite Monday near Lucena del Puerto, a town of more than 3,000 people.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska called Monday and Tuesday critical for containing the central Spain fires, citing a brief improvement in weather even as temperatures stayed above 30 degrees Celsius. Highs near or above 40 degrees are forecast to return from Wednesday.
Spain has also received six firefighting aircraft from Greece, Italy and Turkey and 134 Portuguese firefighters with 41 vehicles, coordinated through the European Commission.
Neighboring Portugal is also fighting six fires, one of which, in the municipality of Braganca, risks spreading into Spain, according to the EFE news agency.
Spain and France are drawing on the European Union's Civil Protection Mechanism, which has supplied 13 firefighting planes, four helicopters, 134 firefighters and 41 fire trucks — seven aircraft and four helicopters to France, and six aircraft to Spain.
The European Forest Fire Information System says Spain and France have together lost around 300,000 hectares to fire this year. France's interior ministry reported more than 13,500 fires burning 116,000 hectares since January, its highest total on record, while Spain's Ministry for Ecological Transition measured 153,000 hectares burned in the first half of the year — six times the level recorded over the same period last year.
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Source: PAP, Polish Radio