A firefighter battles a blaze at Ares in France following a heatwave and water shortages across much of the country [File: Stephane Mahe/Reuters]By Priyanka ShankarPublished On 27 Jul 202627 Jul 2026
Wildfires are rampaging through vast areas of land in southwestern Europe, forcing France and Spain to evacuate more than 325,000 people from their homes.
Some of the worst fires in France since World War II come just weeks after record-breaking heatwaves scorched Europe. Authorities have deployed thousands of firefighters to battle the blazes.
On Sunday, France’s Interior Minister, Laurent Nunez, said about “115,000 hectares (284,171 acres) have burned in wildfires in France since the start of the year”. In Spain, 119,458 hectares (295,187 acres) of land have been burnt as of July 22 , according to data from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).
More than 150,000 hectares have burned across Spain since January, said Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez – that’s six times the area destroyed during the same period last year.
Wildfires destroyed 2.2 million hectares (5.4 million acres) of land in Europe in 2025 – up from 1.4 million hectares (3.5 million acres) in 2022, according to the United Nations.
What is the main cause of the wildfires and why are authorities struggling to contain them?
Since early July, wildfires have been burning across southern and western Europe, with France and Spain being the worst hit.
About 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in France, about 75,000 people in Spain, and around 30,000 others there ordered to shelter in place, according to authorities.
In Spain, a fast-moving wildfire in the Andalusia region killed at least 12 people on July 10 . By July 20 , the fires had spread hundreds of kilometres to the capital, Madrid. At least 10,000 people have been evacuated following wildfires in the central region of Madrid. On July 24 , Spanish authorities declared a national emergency, saying two major blazes were “out of control”.
Over the weekend, a separate blaze in Spain’s eastern Castellon province ravaged more than 4,300 hectares (10,625 acres), regional authorities said.
“The fire is out of control, it’s very difficult to extinguish from a technical standpoint, especially because of the adverse weather conditions that will continue throughout the day,” the regional leader of Valencia, Juanfran Perez, told reporters near the site.
The wildfire in Spain has now entered the Sierra de Espadan natural park, containing large forests of pine trees and cork oaks.
In France, the wildfires are among the country’s worst since World War II and have particularly ravaged the Cap Ferret peninsula, an exclusive holiday destination on France’s southern Atlantic coast about 70km (43 miles) from Bordeaux.
Reporting from Maubec, near Toulouse, Al Jazeera’s Nina Montagu-Smith said: “When I visited Arcachon, a seaside town just across the bay from Cap Ferret on Thursday last week, we could see the fires on the peninsula. Within hours, the sky had blackened and the smoke was thick over Arcachon town.”
“All trains from Arcachon were cancelled, apparently due to an ‘electrical fault’,” she added. “Fire engines were lining the A63 from Bordeaux towards Arcachon on Thursday evening as I drove eastwards to Libourne, which is 100km from the fires in the Gironde region,” she said.
Our correspondent noted that after the wind picked up on Thursday evening, smoke from the blaze reached Libourne, where ash was falling from the sky.
“We have since relocated further east in France towards Toulouse, where the sky is very grey and we could still smell the smoke on Sunday night,” she added.
The wildfires have now spread through areas surrounding Bordeaux, where firefighters were trying to prevent the flames from reaching the regional capital.
Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave said the fire was just 15km (nine miles) from entrances to the main city.
“We have a fire that is not under control and which is moving in the direction of the city area,” Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told France 2 TV on Sunday evening. “The overall situation is very unfavourable, we are in a situation that is unprecedented.”
So far, authorities have moved 197,000 people from areas around Bordeaux – including popular holiday spots which are generally crowded at this time of the year.
The Bordeaux region is famed for its vineyards and the city is one of the main transport hubs for tourists visiting nearby holiday resorts on the Atlantic coast.
Cazenave said earlier on Sunday that there were no plans yet to evacuate Bordeaux, whose wider metropolitan area has a population of about 850,000. Nunez said authorities would continue to assess the situation calmly and realistically, and the government has warned against road or rail travel to the area.
The wildfires disrupted Sunday’s Tour de France finale in Paris, which organisers shortened from 133 to 89 kilometres (83 to 55 miles) after security forces originally assigned to the race were redeployed to fight the fires instead.
Scientists are warning that pyrocumulonimbus clouds – unprecedented in southwest Europe – are forming.
According to the British Royal Meteorological Society, these are thunder clouds “created by intense heat from the Earth’s surface”. They can make conditions almost impossible for firefighters.
They are formed similarly to normal clouds, but “the intense heat that results in the vigorous updraft comes from fire, either large wildfires or volcanic eruptions”, the society said. It explained that there may be a burst of rain because of them but warned that this rain “can then carry embers from the fire, igniting spot fires away from the source. In some cases, dry lightning from these storms can strike without rain, further spreading the wildfire”.
A spokesman for France’s National Firefighters Federation of France (FNSPF) told the AFP news agency: “Lightning forms within the cloud, striking the embers on the ground and further fuelling the fire … It produces a low, rumbling sound. While this type of fire occurs regularly in Canada and Australia, it is unprecedented in France,” he said on Sunday.
“We have reached a point of ‘operational impossibility’ that requires us to accept the need for strategic retreat – to understand and acknowledge a natural force beyond our control,” he said.
“It calls for … knowing what can be done and, above all, what cannot. The situation on the ground is defensive rather than offensive; it is a war-like scenario where we are under constant bombardment and must get everyone to safety,” he added.
Spanish and French authorities say firefighters alone cannot fight the blaze and have appealed for international help.
On Sunday, Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez visited fire-hit areas in Avila, one of three central provinces affected by major blazes alongside Madrid and Toledo, where more than 45,000 hectares (111,000 acres) have burned.
“We have a window of opportunity this weekend to fight the wildfire and, therefore, to protect lives, protect population centres and, ultimately, to bring this very serious wildfire under control as far as possible,” he said.
Sanchez said his government will declare a civil protection emergency for the central provinces plagued by the wildfires on Tuesday, unlocking additional recovery funding.
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu wrote on X on Saturday: “The fires which are hitting our country have reached a level that has never been seen before”.
Lecornu called another government crisis meeting on Saturday for ministers to discuss the response to the emergency, the second such meeting in as many days.
French President Emmanuel Macron was holding a cabinet crisis meeting on Monday.
The European Union’s civil protection mechanism is monitoring the situation and has been assisting. Under the mechanism so far, Greece and Italy have sent firefighting aircraft to Spain, while Portugal has deployed more than 100 military personnel, along with equipment.
Two more aircraft will arrive “as soon as possible” from Turkey, the Spanish interior ministry added on X.
Wildfires have been a common occurrence in Europe in recent years, but authorities have increasingly been struggling to contain them.
Sanchez said the growing scale of the fires and their intensity, fuelled by increasingly extreme weather such as the heatwaves this summer, require policies grounded in climate science.
Eduardo Rojas, chairman of the Board at the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification told Al Jazeera’s Inside Story programme on Sunday that there are multiple factors causing the wildfires which also need attention.
He said the fires in the wild lands of the country have occurred where the “urban interface is extraordinarily complex”. He noted that some areas were “built up in the 60s, 70s and 80s without a proper city plan and with lack of infrastructure, lack of water availability…and with a lack of knowledge of the neighbourhoods.” When a fire occurs, therefore, there is a “lack of knowledge” about how to deal with them.
“The fire in west Madrid is a kind of fire that doesn’t burn a huge area but creates a lot of hesitation,” he said.
“We also have farms where cereals are harvested and even [with] a small lightning [strike], the cereal can start to burn and at the end a big agricultural area ends up burning which is a big damage for farmers,” he noted.
“These kinds of fires need to be tackled in a totally different way because their cause and their environment and conditions are incomparable with one another,” he added.
Laurie Laybourn, executive director of Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, a non-partisan thinktank told Al Jazeera that governments across the continent are unable to cope with the pace at which climate change is occurring.
“All governments develop what are called reasonable worst-case scenarios to inform their planning and in many instances the events that we’re seeing are going beyond even those. So what that tells us is that the tools that we’ve got, the analysis that is informing government planning is a step behind how fast climate change and its supercharging of disasters is,” he said.
According to the European Forest Institute, a wildfire “is a chemical reaction of combustion, which requires a source of heat (lightning, an agricultural “burn” which escapes, or a spark originating in an electric line), oxygen and fuel (forests, shrubs or pastures) to get started.”
“Wildfire risks are increasing worldwide because of climate change and land use change,” the institute added in a July 9 report.
In a recent report, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe issued a warning about climate change, saying it is directly responsible for intensifying wildfires and their increasing frequency.
There are clear indications that climate change is “supercharging” incidents such as wildfires, Laybourn told Al Jazeera.
“Any disaster is very complex. The causes are multilayered, including how we build and how we use land…But climate change is supercharging the conditions that make us vulnerable to things like wildfires and that has been something that’s been predicted now for many decades and tragically becoming true in front of our eyes,” he said.
According to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service, Europe is now the fastest warming continent on Earth, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since 1980.
Laybourn explained that this summer’s heatwaves were also caused by climate change.
He warned and stressed that governments need to prioritise tackling the issue.
“This should be a moment of profound alarm and reflection, particularly for governments.”
