LEGE-CAP FERRET, France — A wildfire generating its own winds pressed toward the outskirts of Bordeaux on Sunday, forcing the overnight evacuation of 55,000 more residents in France's Gironde region and bringing the number displaced by the country's southwestern blazes past 250,000. Together with the fires burning across Spain, the twin emergencies have driven more than 300,000 people from their homes over the past week.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the Gironde fire had grown "extremely virulent again and unpredictable, generating its own winds and advancing erratically toward the Bordeaux metropolitan area," a description that captured how quickly successive European heat waves have turned pine forests and scrubland into fuel that outpaces the response. The blaze has consumed 42,000 hectares, or 162 square miles, since igniting midweek — an area seven times the size of Manhattan and four times that of Paris, and one of the largest forest fires in France since World War II.
At the gates
Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave described the fire as "at the gates of the metropolitan area," saying its nearest edge lay within 15 kilometers, or 9 miles, of the city's outskirts. Cazenave said an evacuation of the wine city itself, home to 268,000 people, was not being contemplated for the moment. A giant exhibition center in Bordeaux has been converted into an emergency shelter, providing camp beds and food for thousands of evacuees, including hundreds of older residents brought out of care homes. The Gironde prefect ordered the partial closure of a major highway heading into the city and shut 60 kilometers of the A63 motorway that leads to Spain.
The rescue mobilized in Gironde now involves 2,500 firefighters, including a Swiss team, 1,500 military personnel and nearly 1,200 police and gendarmes, Nunez said. Eighteen water- and retardant-dropping aircraft and helicopters are working in rotation, joined by an A400M military cargo plane specially converted for firefighting that swooped low over drought-hit woodlands Saturday to trail long plumes of ochre-colored retardant. The government is rushing 1.5 million face masks into the region to protect against choking smoke. Gironde prefect Sophie Brocas said the fire had destroyed about 140 homes. Two firefighters were killed earlier in the week battling the same blaze, the BBC reported.
A second fire burning farther south in the Landes region has forced 36,000 people out this week and is being fought by 550 firefighters. A third, in the Mediterranean Var region, has displaced nearly 3,000. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described the French fires as unprecedented; President Emmanuel Macron said his government would "be there for as long as is needed."
Iberian front
In Spain, uncontrolled blazes around Madrid, west of the capital and now on the Valencia coast have driven 116,000 people from their homes this week. A wildfire in a bushy ravine in Manises, a suburb of Valencia, that burned out of control for four hours killed a man Saturday — the country's first recorded death in the current outbreak, and the latest fatality after a fire earlier this month in southern Spain that killed 13. Overnight into Sunday, a fresh front opened near the coastal city of Valencia, and at least eight municipalities near Toledo were also ordered to evacuate.
"The fire is beyond our capacity to extinguish," Valencia's regional president, Juanfran Pérez Llorca, told reporters late Saturday. Madrid's regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, called the blaze west of the capital the "worst fire in the history of the region." Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, visiting a command post west of Madrid, said 130,000 hectares of forest had already burned in Spain this year, above an annual average of 100,000 hectares over the past decade, and called for "a major public pact on the climate emergency." Spain has deployed 2,600 firefighters, police and emergency personnel backed by 19 aircraft.
Tour rerouted
The scale of the response is straining French emergency services enough to reshape the country's most prominent sporting event. Race organizers and the Paris police department announced Saturday that the 21st and final stage of the Tour de France would be shortened from 133 kilometers to 89 kilometers, with riders starting on the Champs-Elysees rather than in Thoiry, west of the capital. The Amaury Sport Organisation, which runs the race, said security personnel initially assigned to the stage would instead "reinforce the response efforts in the areas affected by the wildfires." Slovenia's Tadej Pogacar is on course for a record-equaling fifth Tour title. Ten European nations — Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Slovakia, Germany and Switzerland — have deployed or committed water-dumping planes, helicopters and firefighters to the two fire fronts.
The caveat
Even officials warning of continued danger acknowledged Sunday's conditions offered a partial reprieve. Nunez said the Gironde fire "became calmer by the end of the night," and Sánchez cited "positive" overnight indications from the Madrid fires. But the Associated Press reported that the virulence of both countries' fires "caught fire crews and authorities off guard," and Sánchez cautioned that "difficult hours lie ahead."
The Gironde prefecture warned that shifting winds and low humidity could return through Sunday afternoon. The next test will come overnight, as fire crews try to hold defensive lines cut through the pine forests between the flames and Bordeaux's western suburbs.