Unchecked wildfires raging Saturday in France’s southwest and near Spain’s capital Madrid have forced 267,000 people to flee and prompted Paris to deploy its military.
France hustled 197,000 people from areas around Bordeaux — including vacation spots crowded this time of year — in what was “probably” the biggest peacetime evacuation the country has seen, its interior minister said.
In Spain, where 70,000 people were evacuated from villages west of Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the priority was “to save lives” as he visited the fire zone.
The sky over Madrid was covered by a haze of brown-grey smoke and thick black ash coated roof terraces in the centre north of the city, AFP journalists saw. Residents forced to keep their windows closed by the smell of throat-irritating smoke.
Jacqueline Villafranca, a 38-year-old originally from Peru who evacuated to Madrid on Friday with her husband and their two daughters, said that when smoke filled her village of Navalagamella “I thought everything was going to burn, the house and everything”.
“Here you can breathe normally — yesterday it was unbearable,” she said, sitting in a gymnasium-turned-shelter.
Overstretched firefighters in Spain and France battling around the clock for days have been unable to contain the infernos, though authorities in both countries suggested the intensity of some of the blazes had notched down.
Firefighters spray water along the edge of a forest during a wildfire near the town of Lege-Cap-Ferret, in southwestern France on July 24, 2026. Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP
So far, no deaths have been reported in the civilian population, but two French firefighters died earlier this week near Bordeaux.
France’s interior minister, Laurent Nunez, said the wildfire in the Gironde region where Bordeaux is located “was less intense last night than we feared” and was no longer a “convective” type of fire that self-fuels through rising currents.
The government delegation in Madrid also said on X early Saturday that overnight conditions had “greatly aided the fight against the wildfires, which advanced little and decreased in intensity”.
But the battles were far from won.
Spain’s Sanchez warned: “We are going to have some complex hours ahead because although the temperatures have gone down, we do not know exactly how the wind will develop, how strong it will be.”