Almost 4,000 people evacuated from tourist sites near Bordeaux as wildfires rage in France and Spain
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- France evacuated nearly 4,000 people from campsites and tourist villages near Lacanau, west of Bordeaux, as returning winds and extreme heat threatened the Gironde wildfire that has already burned 42,000 hectares of forest.
- President Emmanuel Macron, visiting a crisis centre in Bordeaux, called the situation France's "toughest" since World War II and warned "the coming weeks will be tough and we have to hold out."
- Spain's death toll from the Almería wildfire rose to 14 after a woman died in hospital, while a separate blaze in Ávila became Spain's largest on record at 50,000 hectares — surpassing Gironde — prompting a 20-year veteran firefighter to say "this doesn't have a precedent."
- Wildfires across France, Spain, and Italy have forced the evacuation of roughly 330,000 people over the past week, with Spain entering its fourth intense heatwave of the summer on Wednesday.
- The European Union deployed firefighting aircraft from member states to France and Spain, and EU officials warned fires could still be burning into early November in what may be a record-breaking year for burnt land area.
- UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell said "the climate alarm is blaring, from every direction," citing human and economic costs reaching "national emergency" levels, while scientists link the severity to a wet winter that fueled plant growth followed by a dangerously dry summer.
- Estimates buried in the report suggest Europe's heatwaves have claimed at least 10,000 lives, with soil scientists warning that long-running farmland abandonment — which once fragmented fire-prone landscapes — is now making blazes "too strong to put out."
Why it matters: Spain's Ávila fire has become the country's largest wildfire on record at 50,000 hectares, overtaking Gironde's 42,000, and EU officials warn blazes could persist into November. Nearly 4,000 tourists were pulled from French campsites within hours, showing extreme heat is now directly disrupting Europe's summer tourism economy on top of an estimated 10,000 heatwave deaths already recorded continent-wide.
