BORDEAUX, France, July 26 — France is grappling with the most destructive wildfire season in its recorded history, with nearly 98,000 hectares reduced to ash since the start of summer and more than 217,000 residents forced from their homes in the country’s southwest, authorities said on Saturday.
The crisis has overwhelmed local firefighting resources, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to deploy 1,500 military personnel to the worst-hit areas and triggering an appeal for European Union assistance. Croatia, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have dispatched aerial firefighting aircraft to support French crews battling blazes that have raged for days across multiple departments.
The most ferocious fire, in the southwestern department of Gironde — home to the vineyards that produce some of the world’s most celebrated wines — has alone consumed approximately 40,000 hectares. At one point, flames advanced dangerously close to the outskirts of Bordeaux, a UNESCO World Heritage city and the historic heart of the French wine trade.
Sophie Brocas, the top regional official, described the threat as “very serious” even as cooler temperatures and higher humidity on Friday offered firefighters a narrow window to establish containment lines. “The situation remains grave,” Brocas warned, cautioning that shifting winds could reignite the crisis at any moment.
The evacuation figure — 217,000 people across the Gironde region — sets a new national record for wildfire-related displacement in France. Thousands of evacuees have been accommodated in temporary shelters, including Bordeaux’s exhibition center, where roughly 6,000 residents sleep on camp beds arranged across a vast hall converted into an emergency dormitory. Many described fleeing with little more than essential medicines, identity documents, and a few changes of clothing.
The fires have ignited fears across France’s renowned wine-growing regions, where prolonged smoke exposure during the critical grape-ripening season could taint this year’s harvest. Winemakers in Bordeaux, Saint-Émilion, and the surrounding appellations are monitoring air quality closely, though experts say the full impact on the vintage will remain unclear until harvest begins in the coming weeks.
France is not alone. Spain is fighting its own record-setting fire west of Madrid, where around 60,000 people have been evacuated and at least one death has been confirmed in a separate blaze in the country’s east. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said firefighters were racing to “save lives” and protect communities, warning that volatile wind conditions meant “complex hours” still lie ahead.
The twin emergencies highlight what climate scientists have been warning for years: southern Europe is becoming a global wildfire hotspot. According to the European State of the Climate Report 2025, jointly published by the World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe has been warming at twice the global average rate since 1980, making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth.
June 2026 was Western Europe’s warmest June on record, with temperatures in parts of France and Spain exceeding 40 degrees Celsius. That heat — combined with prolonged drought and low humidity — created the conditions for fires to ignite easily and spread with unusual speed. French authorities noted that 54 of the country’s 96 departments were under high or very high fire danger warnings simultaneously this week, nearly double the previous record of 29 set in 2025.
“This is not a normal fire season,” said French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, speaking at a press briefing on Saturday. “The scale, the intensity, the simultaneous outbreaks across multiple regions — this is a new reality.”
The fires have also cast a shadow over one of France’s most cherished summer traditions. Organizers of the Tour de France, which started earlier this month in Barcelona, banned spectators from lining sections of the route in the Pyrénées-Orientales department, where a separate fire has burned nearly 5,000 hectares and forced the evacuation of more than a dozen villages. Only cyclists and their support teams have been authorized to travel the race route, which officials are trying to keep clear for emergency vehicles.
The human toll extends beyond displacement. In the Savoie region of the French Alps, a 22-year-old firefighter was killed earlier this week while battling a blaze — a stark reminder of the risks faced by the thousands of personnel on the front lines.
As firefighting aircraft from across Europe crisscross the skies above southwestern France, the longer-term question is whether this summer marks an exceptional anomaly or the new normal. For the residents of Bordeaux’s exhibition center, sleeping on camp beds under fluorescent lights, the answer already feels clear.
“This used to happen somewhere else — Australia, California,” said one evacuee, a retiree from a village near Arcachon who gave her name only as Marie. “Now it is here. We are not prepared.”