Luggage-clad residents and tourists fled a French peninsula by boat and the smell of smoke drifted into parts of Madrid on Friday as wildfires swept through parts of western Europe, triggering states of emergencies and calls for EU help.
In France, fires raging near the country's prized wine country of Bordeaux forced hundreds of people to flee the Cap Ferret peninsula in the middle of the summer holiday season as the blaze devoured an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan.
In Spain, several blazes were raging out of control within 100 kilometres (60 miles) of Madrid, with some residents of the Spanish capital waking up to the smell of smoke.
Thick acrid smoke bellowed into the sky as the wall of fire crept along parched earth, according to images from Spanish authorities from aircraft flying over the destruction.
Fanned by wind and scorching temperatures topping 40C in some areas, the blazes have killed three firefighters and forced the evacuation of some 50,000 people in the two countries.
"The smoke was incredibly thick. You couldn't breathe," Jose Cobos, who fled his home some 50 kilometres southwest of Madrid with his wife and three dogs, told Antena 3 television.
The total area of land burnt so far this year in EU countries is the second largest on record, according to satellite data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).
French authorities have ordered thousands of tourists on the southwestern Atlantic coast out of campsites and holiday homes, as firefighters backed by water-bombing planes raced to control the blazes.
More than 40,000 people have been evacuated in the region so far.
Both France and Spain have appealed to the European Union for help, with Madrid requesting four specialised planes on Friday, a day after Paris asked Brussels for more resources.
"We are living through a dramatic situation, not only in various Spanish provinces but also in regions of neighbouring countries," Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote on X, saying the government "has deployed all available resources".
In Spain, the government declared a state of emergency in the Madrid region, where more than 10,000 people have been evacuated in recent days.
"Meteorological conditions, fundamentally the wind, will complicate firefighting operations this Friday," the Madrid regional government said in a post on X.
France's southeast was also being hard hit, with Interior Minister Laurent Nunez saying that 32 fires of various intensity were raging across the country.
"We have passed the threshold of 50,000 hectares that have burnt since January 1 of this year," an area nearly five times the size of Paris, said Nunez, adding that the figure was nearly three times that of last year.
In Italy, thousands of emergency workers battled scores of fires in Sicily and in the Calabria region, where a local official said arsonists had started fires by tying rags soaked in flammable liquid to the tails of stray cats to spread the flames.
One firefighter died after falling ill while battling the flames in Sicily, the interior minister said.
Two firefighters died on Tuesday tackling another blaze near Bordeaux airport.
The blazes are breaking out faster because of climate change caused by the burning of oil, coal and gas. European droughts are now more severe, climatologists from the World Weather Attribution group said in a study published on Thursday.
"Climate change is what kills, what destroys our villages and our natural and cultural heritage," civil protection chief Virginia Barcones told Spanish radio.
She warned some fires become so intense that, despite the deployment of aircraft and ground crews, firefighters stand "no chance".
burs-yad/sbk
