LEGE-CAP FERRET, France — A rapidly spreading wildfire forced French authorities to evacuate several suburbs on the western edge of Bordeaux early Saturday morning, threatening the internationally renowned wine-producing city.
The top regional official for the Gironde region, which encompasses Bordeaux, issued the evacuation order in the overnight hours, affecting portions of three western suburbs as well as the city’s airport. Evacuation orders also extended to towns and villages located further west of those suburbs.
“As the fire continues to spread, and despite the significant resources deployed by firefighters, the situation requires the evacuation of residents from the affected areas to ensure their safety,” the regional prefecture stated in an official release.
Taken together, massive fires burning across southwestern France and central Spain have uprooted approximately 200,000 people. Residents near both Madrid and Bordeaux fled their homes on Friday as the blazes burned out of control.
Emergency crews and officials in both countries were caught off guard by how fierce and fast the fires moved, driven by high temperatures and the long-term consequences of climate change. Spanish firefighters acknowledged the flames were moving too quickly and violently to fight directly. In France, some residents were forced to escape by boat as fires tore through popular tourist towns along the Atlantic coastline.
French authorities said roughly 141,000 people evacuated from the Gironde and Landes departments, according to the French interior ministry. Another 60,000 people were displaced west of Madrid in central Spain, according to Spain’s interior ministry.
Dozens of French firefighters sustained injuries during the battle, though officials confirmed no fatalities in either country — even as scenes of panic unfolded, with residents fleeing by car and police going door to door urging people to leave beneath skies darkened by towering columns of smoke.
By Saturday, the Madrid regional government reported that the fires there had decreased in intensity overnight as wind speeds and temperatures fell.
Spain’s Civil Protection Service announced it expected four additional water-dropping aircraft to arrive Saturday — two from Italy and two from Greece — as part of a European Union emergency response. Firefighting planes from the Netherlands and Portugal were already in operation over Spain.
On Friday evening, Gironde region prefect Sophie Brocas warned that strong westerly winds were pushing the fire closer to the greater Bordeaux area and that the blaze had grown to what she called “an unprecedented magnitude.”
“The scale of the fire changed,” she said. “To combat it, we will receive extremely significant national reinforcements. Reinforcements in firefighters, of course, reinforcements in military personnel, reinforcements in healthcare workers, reinforcements in experts. So, we are going to form a much larger team to face this extraordinary fire.”
Residents under evacuation orders received emergency alerts directly to their mobile phones with instructions on how and where to go.
“We want everyone to be quickly brought to safety. We must act quickly together,” Brocas added.
The fire broke out Wednesday near the Cap Ferret peninsula on France’s Atlantic coast, about 60 kilometers — roughly 37 miles — from Bordeaux. On Friday, French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez called it “a large, self-sustaining fire that is extremely difficult to bring under control.”
Laurent Moretti, a resident of the town of Arès, described the situation in stark terms. “It’s quite impressive and even frightening,” he said. “An evacuation on this scale has never happened before. All we really hope is that the firefighters can quickly get it under control.”
