Firefighters on Monday raced to contain the largest wildfires ever recorded in France and Spain as a new wave of extreme weather threatened to fan the flames and start still more blazes.
Infernos in both countries have chewed through parched forests and are at the doorsteps of Madrid and Bordeaux.
In France’s hardest-hit region, Gironde, wildfires have burned through over 100,000 acres and displaced more than 200,000 people. It is one of the largest peacetime evacuations in the country’s history.
“We need to realize that we’re facing a totally unprecedented fire,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Monday evening during a visit with firefighters in Bordeaux. “The situation we’re facing today is the hardest we’ve ever recorded, the hardest since World War II.”
Mr. Macron said that more than 200 homes had been destroyed but that no lives had been lost. The Spanish authorities said at least two people had been killed over the weekend, in the eastern provinces of Castellón and Valencia.
Fueled by vegetation desiccated by weeks of successive heat waves and drought, the fires in France and Spain have resisted round-the-clock containment efforts by more than 4,000 firefighters.
A brief letup in conditions on Sunday night, including a light rain near Bordeaux, helped firefighters slow the spread in several areas. But a dangerous blast of heat and strong winds forecast for this week across Europe is stoking fears of new blazes. Meteorologists are warning of gusty winds, low humidity and temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said on Monday that firefighters had a “crucial” two-day window to bring the fires under control around Madrid before extreme temperatures were expected to return.
“We have the emergency under control and we have the resources, but we have to acknowledge that progress is slow because the weather isn’t helping us,” Mr. Grande-Marlaska said at a news conference on Monday. “Today and tomorrow are absolutely crucial. The forecast for Wednesday is very unfavorable.”
According to Spain’s Ecological Transition Ministry, the wildfires are already the largest in decades.
The Spanish authorities have ordered the evacuations of 60,000 people around Madrid. Hundreds of miles away, in Castellón, a worsening blaze forced the evacuation of another 16,000 people over the weekend. Opening up a dangerous new front, the fire threatened a national park. On a visit there on Monday afternoon, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said blazes had burned their way through more than 100,000 acres since last week.
“This climate emergency is exceeding every threshold and scale that scientists have long warned Spain and Europe as a whole about,” Mr. Sánchez said. He urged those who had been evacuated to be patient until it was safe to return.
In France, the fires forced the closure of a highway heading from the south of Bordeaux to Bayonne, as well as the cancellation of train service south of Bordeaux.
The fires are also threatening a hub of the aerospace and defense industries near Bordeaux, imperiling plants that produce some of the world’s most sophisticated technologies and work with dangerous materials. Employees have been evacuated from one site where chemical rocket fuel is packed into boosters for submarine-launched nuclear missiles, and from another where those missiles are dismantled and decontaminated after they are retired.
For winemakers in the Bordeaux region, smoke from the fires is one more threat on top of this summer’s heat and drought. It is just weeks before the grape harvest, and the fruit is susceptible to absorbing it. “This year, it feels like we’re on another planet,” said Gabriel Barre, 44, who owns an independent wine operation in Fronsac.
Six years ago, winemakers in Northern California were forced to dump tens of thousands of tons of grapes contaminated with smoke from a huge wildfire.
The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said over the weekend that France had requested information about how to best fight fires. The state provided case studies of significant California wildfires to French and Spanish officials, according to the office.
So far this summer, 116,000 hectares, or roughly 287,000 acres, of forests have burned in France, the French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said on Monday. That far exceeds the previous record, the 72,000 hectares that burned in 2022. The devastation then led the government to strengthen and expand its firefighting systems.
The fire near Bordeaux is believed to have been caused by a brush-clearing machine used by workers in an area around a high-voltage power line, the Bordeaux prosecutor, Renaud Gaudeul, said in a statement on Friday.
In a broadcast interview on Monday, Mr. Gaudeul said that the investigation was still continuing but that the brush-clearing machines remained the most likely cause.
But some of the other blazes have been tied to other causes.
Five people have been arrested, accused of lighting cigarettes or a barbecue in the forest, of intentionally setting small trees on fire, or of setting off fireworks over the highway.
Since July 6, 162 arrests have been made in France in connection with fires, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on social media on Monday. He warned that arson was a crime punishable by 15 years of imprisonment.
Reporting was contributed by Mark Landler, Leo Sands, Nazaneen Ghaffar, Giulia Imbert and Ephrat Livni.
