Firefighters in southwestern France held a vast wildfire within its perimeter on Saturday, allowing about 198,000 people to return home following what may rank as the country’s largest peacetime evacuation, even as fresh blazes forced thousands to flee elsewhere in France and Greece.
The contrasting developments — mass returns in the Gironde region alongside renewed displacement in the Mediterranean Var and boat evacuations from a Greek resort — underscored how rapidly hard-won firefighting gains can unravel across the continent.
In the Var, a fire believed to have halted its advance instead tore across 10 square kilometers (4 square miles) in six hours on Friday. The local prefecture described the blaze as moving “faster than a horse at full gallop.”
The Gironde fire has consumed 420 square kilometers (162 square miles) of pine forest west of Bordeaux, an area roughly four times the size of Paris. Crews said the fire remained contained on Saturday, meaning flames had not breached existing boundaries, though it had not yet been declared “fixed” — the threshold at which a fire is judged to be no longer advancing. Active sectors and buried hot spots persisted.
Several communities remained largely deserted despite the returns. Authorities kept the affluent seaside area of Cap Ferret under evacuation orders as a precaution.
At their peak, wildfires in France and Spain alone drove some 330,000 people from homes and holiday destinations, stretching firefighters, aircraft and emergency services across simultaneous crises. The scale of displacement had already pushed combined evacuation figures past 340,000 in recent weeks.
The fires form part of a punishing summer across southern Europe, where prolonged drought and record temperatures have primed vast stretches of vegetation to ignite. Greece has battled multiple fronts, with tourists evacuated by sea from a coastal resort, while Spanish crews continue to contain blazes across several regions.
Europe is the planet’s fastest-warming continent, heating at more than twice the global average since the 1980s, the European Union’s Copernicus climate service has reported. Rising temperatures and sustained drought dry out vegetation, enabling fires to spread more quickly and burn with greater intensity.
The heat has strained other systems as well. Record low water levels along the Danube have curtailed nuclear power production in Hungary and hydropower generation in Serbia, illustrating the broader consequences of the region’s extreme conditions.
Emergency officials cautioned that shifting winds and lingering heat could reignite contained zones or spark new fires with little warning. Authorities in the Gironde said residents returning home should remain prepared to evacuate again if conditions deteriorate in the days ahead.