The fires in Spain and France were not yet under control on Saturday and forced the evacuation of nearly 270,000 people around Madrid and near the large French city of Bordeaux, where the Minister of the Interior spoke of a slight “lull”.
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A little optimism is blowing over the terrible fires ravaging France and Spain. In the French department of Gironde (south-west), “the fire was less virulent last night than we could have feared” and “is no longer convective”, that is to say that it is no longer self-feeding, declared Mr. Nuñez, referring “a little” to a “lull”.
Since Friday, the authorities have ordered all residents to leave the very touristy French peninsula of Cap-Ferret, near Bordeaux, by road, but also by boat.
French firefighters trying to control the forest fire near Saumos and Sainte-Hélène, northwest of Bordeaux, in the Gironde department.
AFP
In one of the huge hangars of the city’s exhibition center which accommodated between 5 and 6,000 evacuees, Olivier Stewart, 38, who left Mérignac in the night with his wife and their young children as soon as they received an alert on their phone, says that “it’s especially the children who are stressed, they think the fire will burn the house down, but we’re fine”.
“We arrived yesterday (Friday) around 7 p.m. It took us about four hours to arrive, because there were traffic jams,” explains Frédéric Tavitian, a 70-year-old retiree, who tunes his guitar while sitting on his camp bed.
“At 3 p.m., we were told: “we must evacuate”. We saw columns of smoke, like a volcano that was about to explode. And we left,” he confides.
“Biggest fire of the season”
The flames have already covered more than 32,000 hectares, three times the area of Paris, and destroyed at least 100 buildings, authorities said of the “biggest fire of the season”.
An “unprecedented” wildfire ravaging southwest France is heading toward the city of Bordeaux, an official said July 24, 2026.
AFP
Motorists have been called to avoid the Gironde and to leave the “roads free for emergency services”, while Saturday is classified red (very difficult traffic) in the direction of vacation departures.
“It’s desolation,” breathes Matthieu Plessis, 40, discovering on Saturday his chickens with blackened plumage and the still smoking ruins of his house along the road linking Lège-Cap-Ferret to Porge across the burned Gironde.
He had left the place on Friday and his house, “still there yesterday evening”, “burned in the night”. “It was hell, at 3 p.m., it was dark, there was so much smoke and we saw the firefighters leaving little by little, the winds changed and there was no one left to protect the houses. »
In Spain, where terrible fires are also raging, the priority is to “save lives”, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez insisted on Saturday morning.
The regional prefect, Francisco Martín Aguirre, warned that Saturday would be “difficult” due to “erratic gusts”, but here too there is relative optimism. With the increase in “relative humidity” and “the drop in temperatures (…) there is now a real opportunity to attack this fire with a good chance of success,” he continues.
Holidaymakers sit on Moutchic beach in Lacanau, southwest France, July 24, 2026, as clouds of smoke rise into the sky from a forest fire.
AFP
Two separate wildfires joined together on Friday to form one huge blaze, which was about to merge with yet another in the neighboring region of Castile and León.
The sky over Madrid is covered in a gray-brown haze of smoke. The raging flames ravaged up to 25,000 hectares to the west of this great European capital.
Thick black ash covered the roof terraces of houses north of the city center, and a smell of smoke irritated the throats and forced residents to keep their windows closed. In El Escorial, the town’s historic monastery was enveloped in smoke, AFP journalists noted.
Firefighters fought through the night against the “worst fire in history” in the area, according to regional authorities. Using construction equipment, firefighters tried to put out the grassland fires.
“Every summer there are fires”, but “this one was terrible”, Mar Nicolás, the mayor of Brunete, told AFP, very close to other localities evacuated or affected by the flames.
In the Madrid region, more than 70,000 people had now been evacuated, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska announced.
More than 1,200 elderly and disabled people were evacuated from care establishments and retirement homes on Friday.
“My eyes are burning”
Jacqueline Villafranca, 38, from Peru, was evacuated on Friday from the village of Navalagamella with her husband and two daughters aged 16 and 2 to the northern Madrid suburb of Alcobendas.
“Here, we can breathe normally – yesterday (in Navalagamella), it was unbearable,” she told AFP. My daughter said to me: “Mom, I can’t open my eyes, my eyes are burning.” And then the alerts started to sound and I evacuated.”
In France as in Spain, these fires are the consequence of forests and vegetation made more flammable by the drought and exceptional heat waves which have occurred since June in Western Europe.
No deaths have been reported so far in either country.
A few hours after France, Spain announced that it had activated the “European Civil Protection Mechanism” and requested “four aerial means of fighting fires”, indicating that Greece had “accepted the request, offering two Canadair planes”.
The European Union has deployed four planes to Spain and three to France, the European Commission said.
In total, nearly 168,000 hectares have already burned since January 1 in Spain, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), and 98,000 in France, according to Sébastien Lecornu.
Even northern Europe is affected: Scottish firefighters were battling a vegetation fire in the Cairngorms National Park on Saturday, declared a “major incident” by the authorities who asked the population to evacuate.
