Thousands of people flee raging wildfires in France and Spain

▶ Watch Video: Europe battling multiple fire fronts, threatening major cities in unprecedented conditions

At least one person has died, and more than 250,000 people have been forced to flee parts of Western Europe on Saturday as out-of-control wildfires continued to rage in Spain and France.

Thick black ash coated roof terraces in the north of Madrid’s center, the Spanish capital, where 70,000 people were evacuated as residents were forced to keep their windows closed by the smell of throat-irritating smoke.

One person was killed in the town of Manises in Spain, according to local authorities.

“Unfortunately, the fire has claimed the life of one person,” the Manises City Council said in a post on X.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, visiting the fire zone near Madrid, said the priority was to “save lives” while warning that a “complex” fight lay ahead. His government declared a national emergency.

Fires have burned 130,000 hectares of forest already this year in Spain, up from an annual average of 100,000 hectares over the past decade, Sanchez said. He said more favorable weather on Saturday offered “a window of opportunity” for fire crews to bring the blazes under control.

“We 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,” he said.

Jacqueline Villafranca, a 38-year-old originally from Peru who evacuated to Madrid on Friday with her husband and their two daughters, said when smoke filled her village of Navalagamella, “I thought everything was going to burn, the house and everything.”

“Here you can breathe normally — yesterday it was unbearable,” she said, sitting in a gymnasium-turned-shelter.

Among those who fled from a suburban town was audiovisual technician Luis, who had spent the afternoon helping evacuees from the village of Pelayos de la Presa when he received the order to evacuate.

“I cried at first because it’s where I grew up. But now, it’s more a feeling of anger and resignation, because there’s nothing we can do as long as we’re not allowed to go back and see what we’ll find there,” he told AFPTV.

The fires in Spain and France advanced quickly because of tinderbox conditions worsened by successive heat waves the two countries have experienced since May.

Scientists say global warming is increasing droughts and causing weather emergencies to become more extreme and more frequent. Europe is the fastest-warming continent due to climate change.

In France, nearly 242,000 acres have been ravaged by wildfires – which French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said was a “historic record” nearly 10 times the size of Paris. At least 197,000 people have been evacuated in France as a result of the wildfires, in what was “probably” the biggest peacetime evacuation the country has seen, Nunez said on Saturday.

The total area of land burned so far this year across EU countries is the second largest on record, according to satellite data from the European Forest Fire Information System.

The major fires in both countries have been burning for two or three days, exhausting the many hundreds of firefighters battling them around the clock.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described the fires as unprecedented and said the Gironde blaze had become so strong that it was generating its own winds.

“Our priority is clear: protecting human lives,” he posted on social media, adding that evacuation orders “must be respected without delay.”

“We will take no risks when it comes to the safety of the French people,” he added.

French President Emmanuel Macron has deployed 1,000 soldiers to help firefighters near Bordeaux, and on Saturday his government ordered an A400M military transport aircraft to join the fleet of smaller planes already dousing flames.

The modified A400M, which can release 20 tons of fire retardant, is an experimental fit-out that has only just completed preparations and testing.

The head of the Paris fire brigade on Saturday told AFP that around 100 firefighters from the French capital were being deployed to help in the southwest, adding to 45 firefighters and six vehicles already sent there.

Spain and France have also requested, and received, help in the form of aircraft sent from other European countries.

Italy said two of its Canadair water-dumping firefighting planes were deployed to Spain. Spain’s Civil Protection Service said it was expecting the arrival Saturday of two others from Greece, to join aircraft from the Netherlands and Portugal already deployed in Spain.

France is expecting two water-bombers from Croatia as well as two other planes from Portugal and two heavy-lift Black Hawk helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

“It’s quite impressive and even frightening,” Laurent Moretti, a resident in the town of Arès in France, told the Associated Press. “An evacuation on this scale has never happened before. All we really hope is that the firefighters can quickly get it under control.”

Dozens of French firefighters have been injured, authorities said, but no deaths were reported in either country.

Emergency shelters were set up in schools and gymnasiums in southwestern France for tourists and residents left wondering what they would return to.

“We had no one to put us up,” said Caroline Larrode, 49, who had fled her home in Saumos for a huge Bordeaux hangar housing people evacuated from the Arcachon Basin with her three cats.

Nuala Kelly, a 75-year-old Irish tourist, said she had never seen anything like this.

“Never, never, never, never, never, and I’ve travelled all over the world and been in all sorts of situations,” she told AFP at Bordeaux’s vast exhibition center now housing thousands of people.

The organizers of the Tour de France announced they would shorten Sunday’s final stage of the race due to the blazes. 

“In a spirit of national solidarity with the areas and communities affected, it was decided to adapt the route for the final stage from Thoiry to Paris,” the organizers said in a statement.

At least 5,700 more people than usual died in France last month amid a historic heat wave, French health officials said earlier this week. That figure represented a sharp increase in the estimated death toll nationwide from June and early July’s record temperatures.

In Italy, thousands of emergency workers battled scores of fires in Sicily and in the Calabria region, where a local official said arsonists had started fires by tying rags soaked in flammable liquid to the tails of stray cats to spread the flames.