Tens of thousands of people fled their homes on Friday as wildfires ravaged vast areas of France and Spain, with broiling summer temperatures across Western Europe exacerbating the ferocity of the blazes.
In southwestern France, the authorities ordered the evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula, a popular Atlantic holiday destination. Hundreds of people fled by boat as a fast-moving wildfire approached.
Firefighters were battling what Sophie Brocas, the prefect of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, described as a highly unpredictable, “XXL” wildfire. She characterized the fire and another burning in the Landes, farther south, as the “two ogres of the summer.”
In total, more than 60,000 people in France have fled their homes, according to the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez.
In Spain, wildfires in the Madrid area forced more than 19,000 people to evacuate and had burned almost 15,000 acres by Friday afternoon. The blazes were closing in on populated areas.
“This is the worst wildfire in the Madrid region’s history,” Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional president, said on Friday. “Our priority is to save lives, nothing else,” she said, adding that the authorities were working to evacuate residents from towns threatened by the fires.
The Spanish government requested additional resources from the European Union after declaring a national emergency over the fires in Madrid.
“We cannot be optimistic. Today is a critical day,” Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s interior minister, said on Friday. The authorities were particularly concerned that several fires burning in the area could merge into a single, larger blaze.
The fires in France and Spain are part of a broader wave of wildfires this summer across Europe, where repeated heat waves since late May have brought extreme temperatures and caused deaths. Last month was the hottest June on record in Western Europe, according to Copernicus, a European Union monitoring agency.
About two weeks ago, a wildfire in the southeastern Spanish province of Almería killed 13 people, making it one of the country’s deadliest fires on record.
France, too, has faced wildfires of unusual intensity. A few weeks ago, President Emmanuel Macron said that France had “never faced so many outbreaks of fire across the country since the end of World War II.”
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