Firefighters in southwest France are fighting against a mega-fire four times the size of Paris.
Meanwhile, temperatures are expected to climb above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday.
The heat wave and forecast winds could hamper progress against the blaze that has forced 220,000 people from their homes, authorities for the Gironde region around Bordeaux said.
While authorities said the situation was calm overnight, the onset of heat-wave temperatures and winds heightened the risk of flames flaring again.
In neighboring Spain, people are bracing for the fourth heat wave of the summer, with several blazes still burning out of control.
Across France and Spain, roughly 330,000 people have been driven from homes and vacation sites by huge wildfires.
Here's the latest:
Bordeaux winemaker says mega-fire will be bad for business
The Grand Verdus wine chateau near Bordeaux isn’t in the path of the monster fire, but it is bracing for the economic impact.
Edouard le Grix de la Salle, who runs the family business with his brother, is alarmed that France’s interior minister and other government authorities have urged people to avoid the Bordeaux region because of the blaze west of the historic city. August is a peak period for tourism in southwest France.
“It’s incredible that they’ve said such a thing, especially when wine tourism is becoming more and more important,” Grix de la Salle said in an Associated Press interview. “How did they not think about protecting that sector? And the cultural sector too—there’s so much to visit in Bordeaux. There are so many museums, there are châteaux. It’s unbelievable.”
Wildfire shuts down highway in Turkey
A wildfire in southwest Turkey has forced authorities to temporarily shut down a highway from the popular tourist hub of Fethiye to the city of Antalya.
The blaze began in an agricultural area in Mugla province on Wednesday before spreading into a nearby forest area, driven by strong winds.
Five airplanes, 11 helicopters, 40 fire trucks and hundreds of personnel were dispatched to extinguish the fire, the Mugla governor’s office said.
The statement called on motorists to use alternative routes and not to block emergency lanes.
Thousands of evacuees in Spain set to return home as Castellón blaze challenges firefighters
Tens of thousands of evacuees in central Spain were expected to return home starting Wednesday after firefighters made progress with blazes burning in the Madrid region and Ávila.
Authorities began lifting evacuation orders on several towns in the Madrid region late Tuesday, allowing some 20,000 people to return to their homes, along with 14,000 people who had been under shelter-at-home orders, according to Francisco Martín, the Madrid region’s central government representative.
Some villages in Ávila, which was battling the biggest fire in the history of Spain, were also expected to be allowed to go back to their homes. Authorities were expected to provide more details Wednesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, 10,000 people were still under evacuation orders due to a wildfire in Castellón in eastern Spain that authorities said was still not under control.
Spain braces for another heatwave as it battles fires
Spain’s weather agency AEMET is warning that the risk of wildfires remains very high or extreme across much of the country.
Back-to-back heatwaves have suffocated Spain this summer, with temperatures repeatedly exceeding 40 Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
The fresh heatwave was expected to mainly affect the northeast and parts of central Spain, while temperatures were pushing 40 Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in several inland areas in the normally hot, southern Andalusia region.
As heat wave stretches across Europe, UK health officials warn of risks
Temperatures are expected to reach 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit) in eastern England on Wednesday, pushing parts of the country into its fourth heat wave of the year, according to the UK Met Office.
The U.K. Health Security Agency has issued an amber heat-health advisory for London and southeast England, warning of increased risk to older people and the very young that may strain health and social care providers.
Temperatures are expected to drop on Thursday, with forecast highs around 27 degrees C (81 degrees Fahrenheit), the Met Office said.
This spring was the warmest ever recorded in England, and temperatures remained well above normal in June and July, the Met Office said earlier this month. The average mean temperature in England was 2.4 degrees (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above average between June 1 and July 15, the agency said.
French firefighters’ battle plan is “we strike quickly and strike hard”
So says Matthieu Jomain, a commander in the massive effort to contain the mega-blaze in southwest France that’s burned through an area four times the size of Paris.
Speaking Wednesday, Jomain said the blaze burning since last week isn’t growing any more but still isn’t beaten. A heat wave that will further dry out already arid forests and scrubland is heightening the risk of flames flaring again. Fire crews are bracing for forecast temperatures above 40 C (104 F).
“More than 2,200 firefighters are still deployed,” he said. “Almost all of France’s firefighters are there. Our European counterparts have come to lend us a hand on the ground and in the air. We have a fleet of over twenty aircraft.”
“The strategy remains the same. We strike quickly and strike hard at any new smoke emissions.”
How to keep the air inside your home clean during wildfires
Wildfire smoke can settle over cities for days — like the recent blanket over parts of the U.S. from burning fires in Canada, which has created hazardous air for millions of people across multiple states.
Health officials advise people to stay indoors — and to take steps to keep the air in your home clean:
Survivors face an uncertain future
For the hundreds of thousands of evacuees, the question is the same: What will they find when they’re finally allowed to go home, or to what’s left of it?
With no word on when she’ll be able to return home, Elvira Menéndez will spend her third night on Sunday at the makeshift shelter set up in a sports complex in Villaviciosa de Odón, a 40-minute drive from the home she was forced to leave as the blaze neared.
On Friday afternoon, two major fires near Madrid merged into a single blaze. It later combined with another that was already burning in Ávila, north of the capital. This forced the government to declare a national fire emergency for the first time. Since then, the flames have also spread to Toledo, a province southwest. In all, the flames have scorched 77,000 hectares in the central part of the country alone.
Menéndez’s anguish was shared by Rocío Domínguez, who fled her house with only the clothes on her back. “All the clothes, all the memories, everything, everything, everything,” were left behind, she told The Associated Press.
French wildfire created a monster cloud, unleashing lightning that ignited more fires
France’s wildfire grew so powerful that its smoke column became a thunderstorm, generating lightning that struck the ground and ignited new fires beyond the original blaze, French officials said.
Put another way, that means the inferno was no longer simply being propelled by the weather. It was making its own. The thundercloud also produced violent, erratic winds capable of driving the flames in new directions.
The phenomenon, called a pyrocumulonimbus, or pyroCb, is rare in Europe and more commonly documented in North America and Australia, where it occurs only over some of the most extreme fires. France’s national firefighters federation said it had never before recorded one in the country.
At about 6:20 p.m. Friday, two days after the fire began, the departmental fire and rescue service said it had generated a pyrocumulonimbus. The cloud weakened overnight as humidity rose, then formed several times again.
Repeatedly, heat and smoke have surged upward into a vast black thundercloud, electrified and lit from within.
A 2:47 a.m. alert, a rabbit and 220,000 evacuees as France’s wildfire rages on
Europe is experiencing one of its biggest evacuations since World War II. Among the more than 220,000 people told to flee are Morgane Bonichot, her 9-year-old daughter and their pets.
Her daughter was in the blaze's epicenter when it ignited last week, staying with an uncle in the midst of the pine forests, scrub and farmland being consumed by an inferno so virulent that it has morphed at times into a self-feeding firestorm, spitting lightning bolts that have sparked yet more flames.
Among the fire’s first evacuees, the daughter came home Friday. But with the flames spreading closer to her mother’s house west of Bordeaux, the daughter began preparing to flee again.
All told, regional authorities have emptied two dozen towns and villages, some ravaged by fire. Others between the blaze and Bordeaux, including Saint-Jean-d’Illac, were evacuated as a precaution by government officials who say their priority is making sure that no lives are lost.
Wildfires are more extreme in Europe and North America, but global burning is oddly decreasing
As wildfires in Europe and North America grow more extreme, key worldwide burning statistics are at a record low largely because Africa and Asia are controlling fire more.
Experts say these seemingly opposite trends are happening at the same time because of what humanity is doing to the planet.
Spain's wildfire is that country's largest on record at more than 193 square miles (500 square kilometers), while wildfires in Europe have burned just a bit under 2025's all-time high. In Canada and the United States this summer, land burned by wildfires is at least 25% higher than the 10-year average and more than double what it was decades ago, according to national wildfire centers.
And yet the world went into July this year with record low global emissions from burning fires, a key measure of their prevalence, the European climate center Copernicus reported. That is because fires in Africa and Asia are way down due to changing agricultural practices, fire management and where people are moving to, said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus.
A heat wave threatens to reignite France’s mega-fire near Bordeaux
Fire crews battled a mega-fire four times the size of Paris in southwest France while facing tinderbox temperatures forecast to climb above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday.
The heat wave and forecast winds could hamper progress against the blaze that has forced 220,000 people from their homes, authorities for the Gironde region around Bordeaux said.
In a Wednesday morning update on the huge firefighting effort, Gironde authorities said the situation overnight had been “calm” and that the blaze hadn’t spread — although it’s still not contained a week after it started.
The onset of heat-wave temperatures and winds heightened the risk of flames flaring again.
On Tuesday, Gironde authorities ordered 4,000 more people evacuated from tourist sites along the Atlantic coast, widening what may be France's largest peacetime evacuation.