RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Issued on: 26/07/2026 - 00:57 Modified: 26/07/2026 - 22:38
By: FRANCE 24 Some 115,000 hectares have burned in wildfires in France since the start of the year, "far more than anything we have seen in the past", Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said Sunday. Blazes in the southwestern Gironde region have forced 220,000 people to evacuate so far. And with temperatures set to rise again on Tuesday, the region's top official Sophie Brocas said the situation could get worse. Read our liveblog to see how the day's events unfolded.
This liveblog is no longer being updated. Click here to read more of FRANCE 24's coverage on the wildfires in Europe.
Plumes of smoke rose above a vast sea of pine trees outside Bordeaux as firefighters in gleaming helmets rushed to douse emerging flames before they could spread.
"It's intense, titanic," said Florian Lointier of the Paris Fire Brigade, an army unit dispatched to southwest France to help exhausted crews tackle the huge wildfire.
More than 5,000 firefighters, military personnel, police officers and volunteers have been battling the ferocious blaze, which has forced one of the largest evacuations in France's history and was 15 kilometres from Bordeaux's suburbs.
FRANCE 24's Camille Knight brings us more with this report.
Some 115,000 hectares (284,000 acres) have burned in wildfires in France since the start of the year, "far more than anything we have seen in the past", Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said Sunday.
France is currently battling 30 to 40 wildfires daily, Nunez told France 2 television.
Conditions remained "very unfavourable" on major fronts, including the southwestern regions of Gironde and Landes, and in the Mediterranean Var region.
A total of 2,500 firefighters, including a Swiss firefighting team, 1,500 military personnel and around 1,200 police have been deployed to Gironde, Nuñez said earlier.
Sanchez said his government would on Tuesday declare a civil protection emergency for the central provinces plagued by the wildfires, unlocking additional recovery funding.
More than 150,000 hectares have burned across Spain since January, he said, six times the area destroyed during the same period last year.
While wildfires have long been a feature of Spain's summers, Sanchez said their growing scale and intensity, fuelled by increasingly extreme weather, required policies grounded in climate science.
French President Emmanuel Macron will chair a crisis cabinet meeting Monday morning to discuss the wildfires ravaging several areas of southwest France, his office said on Sunday.
The meeting is scheduled to take place at 11am.
Hundreds of people in Italy were evacuated by sea on Sunday as a wildfire swept through parts of the southern Adriatic coast, with many more expected to be rescued, the coastguard said.
"More than 400 tourists and beachgoers have been evacuated by sea, the only viable evacuation route," the coastguard said on its WhatsApp channel, adding that operations were ongoing.
Evacuees were being rescued from the area around the town of Peschici in the southern Puglia region.
A coastguard spokesman told AFP that around 300 more people were expected to be evacuated.
"'Six coastguard vessels, three boats from Italy's financial police and around 10 private vessels were involved in the operation," the coastguard said.
Images showed firefighters and a Canadair waterbomber battling the blaze, which was not immediately threatening homes in the town. A huge plume of smoke could be seen from dozens of kilometres away.
"The situation is currently under control," Peschici mayor Luigi d'Arenzo was quoted as saying by local daily Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno.
The wildfires ravaging areas around Spain's capital Madrid have included the largest forest fire in the country's recent history, a government official said on Sunday.
Sara Aagesen, Minister for Ecological Transition, told journalists the part of the wildfires affecting 50,000 hectares of the Avila area west of Madrid was "the largest forest fire in our country's recent history".
She did not define the extent of damage or burned land in the total of 77,000 hectares she said had been "affected" in the Madrid, Avila and Toledo regions hit by the wildfires.
"It will not be possible for evacuated communities to return until the fire is under control," the top official of the Gironde region, Sophie Brocas, said during a press briefing.
Her statement confirmed earlier comments by Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.
Brocas said temperatures were set to rise again on Tuesday, which could worsen the situation.
She also urged workers in non-evacuated areas not to travel through evacuated communities to reach their jobs.
The gigantic wildfire in southwest France has created an extremely dangerous "pyrocumulonimbus", a phenomenon never before seen in the country, the spokesman for the country's National Firefighters Federation of France (FNSPF) told AFP.
The cloud formation occurs when intense wildfires roast the air near the ground, causing it to rise quickly and then become a fire cloud, which in turn generates its own wind and can worsen fires. If it grows very large, it can even cause lightning. The phenomenon also occurs during volcanic eruptions.
NASA calls them "fire-breathing dragon of clouds".
"We don't know how the blaze will spread, the fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly. It's a David-versus-Goliath scenario," said FNSPF spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Eric Brocardi.
"Salvation will come either from the sky – in the form of rain, though it would need to pour heavily for three days – or by finding a way to steer the fire toward a place where it will die out on its own. The sea, for example."
"We send strength to the firefighters and all of those working tirelessly to protect the public and our regions," the team wrote on X.
"Civilian farmers are trying to help firefighters by bringing in tankers of water to keep their hoses running," ...
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