More than 20,000 residents and holidaymakers were evacuated from coastal towns and campsites in south-west France on Thursday as a fast-moving wildfire tore through pine forests near Bordeaux. The blaze, which broke out on Wednesday near the village of Saumos, had consumed between 2,400 and 3,400 hectares by Thursday afternoon, according to the Gironde prefecture, and was advancing towards the Lège-Cap-Ferret peninsula, a popular Atlantic tourist area. Some 700 firefighters, supported by water-bombing aircraft, were battling flames that local commanders described as exceptionally intense, with flames reaching tens of metres in height. No civilian casualties had been reported from this fire, but two French firefighters died on Tuesday while tackling a separate blaze near Bordeaux airport.

Across the border in Spain, a wildfire in the province of Guadalajara, north-east of Madrid, had burned approximately 32,000 hectares since it began the previous Thursday, making it the second-largest wildfire in the country’s recorded history, Spanish emergency services said. The fire forced the evacuation of 34 municipalities and around 1,200 people, though some residents were later permitted to return. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, visiting the area, noted that the country had already suffered 22 major wildfires this year, four times the number recorded in the same period of 2025. In Italy, a firefighter died on Wednesday while combating flames in Sicily, where around 6,000 personnel were deployed against dozens of fires fanned by temperatures exceeding 40°C. Authorities in the neighbouring Calabria region reported more than 160 fires in 24 hours, with the local civil protection chief alleging that many were deliberately set, including cases where rags soaked in flammable liquid were tied to the tails of stray cats to spread the flames, according to the AFP news agency.

The cause of the Gironde fire remained under investigation, but the mayor of Le Porge told reporters it may have been started accidentally by a brush-clearing machine, a possibility that police said they were examining. The prefecture subsequently banned all forestry work using thermal engines in the department. In Spain, the Guadalajara fire was also suspected to have been triggered by agricultural activity, though no official determination had been made. Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group published a study on Thursday concluding that the severe drought afflicting the continent was made more intense by human-caused climate change, which has contributed to a series of early and prolonged heatwaves across southern Europe.

By Thursday evening, the Gironde fire remained uncontrolled and the situation was “unfavourable”, the prefecture said, with shifting winds complicating containment efforts. Evacuation orders were still in effect for several communities, and authorities warned that the danger of new outbreaks remained extreme across much of Spain and the Balearic Islands. Provisional figures from the European Forest Fire Information System indicated that the area burned in the EU so far this year was the second highest in two decades of satellite monitoring, while France’s interior minister said more than 44,000 hectares had already been destroyed nationally, surpassing the total for the whole of 2022.