More than 267,000 people were forced to flee parts of Spain and France on Saturday as wildfires continued to rage across Western Europe.
Thick black ash coated roof terraces in the north of Madrid's center, and 70,000 people were evacuated there as residents were forced to keep their windows closed by the smell of throat‑irritating smoke.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, visiting the fire zone near Madrid, said the priority was to "save lives," warned that a "complex" fight lay ahead and said his government had declared a national emergency.
Sanchez said fires have burned 130,000 hectares of forest already this year in Spain, up from an annual average of 100,000 hectares over the past decade, and said more favorable weather on Saturday offered "a window of opportunity" for crews.
"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," Sanchez said.
Jacqueline Villafranca, 38, who evacuated to Madrid with her husband and two daughters, said, "I thought everything was going to burn, the house and everything." She added, "Here you can breathe normally — yesterday it was unbearable," while sitting in a gymnasium‑turned‑shelter, and audiovisual technician Luis said, "I cried at first because it's where I grew up. But now, it's more a feeling of anger and resignation, because there's nothing we can do as long as we're not allowed to go back and see what we'll find there," he told AFPTV.
The fires advanced quickly because of tinderbox conditions worsened by successive heat waves since May, and scientists said global warming is increasing droughts and causing weather emergencies to become more extreme and more frequent, with Europe the fastest‑warming continent due to climate change.
In France nearly 242,000 acres have been ravaged by wildfires, which French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez called a "historic record" nearly 10 times the size of Paris, and at least 197,000 people have been evacuated in what Nunez said was "probably" the biggest peacetime evacuation the country has seen.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described the fires as unprecedented and said the Gironde blaze had become so strong it was generating its own winds; "Our priority is clear: protecting human lives," he posted on social media, adding evacuation orders "must be respected without delay." French President Emmanuel Macron deployed 1,000 soldiers to help firefighters near Bordeaux and ordered an A400M military transport aircraft to join smaller planes, a modified A400M that can release 20 tons of fire retardant and has only just completed preparations and testing, and the head of the Paris fire brigade said about 100 firefighters from the capital were being sent to the southwest in addition to 45 firefighters and six vehicles already dispatched.
Spain and France requested and received international assistance: Italy deployed two Canadair water‑dumping planes to Spain; Spain's Civil Protection Service said it expected two more planes from Greece to arrive Saturday to join aircraft from the Netherlands and Portugal already operating there; France said it expected two water‑bombers from Croatia, two planes from Portugal and two heavy‑lift Black Hawk helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Satellite data from the European Forest Fire Information System showed the total area burned so far this year across EU countries is the second largest on record.
Dozens of French firefighters have been injured, authorities said, but no deaths were reported in either country; emergency shelters were set up in schools and gymnasiums in southwestern France for tourists and residents, and evacuee Caroline Larrode said, "We had no one to put us up." Irish tourist Nuala Kelly said, "Never, never, never, never, never, and I've travelled all over the world and been in all sorts of situations." Organizers of the Tour de France said they would shorten Sunday's final stage from Thoiry to Paris "in a spirit of national solidarity with the areas and communities affected." French health officials said earlier this week that at least 5,700 more people than usual died in France last month during a historic heat wave, and in Italy thousands of emergency workers battled fires in Sicily and Calabria where a local official said arsonists had started blazes by tying rags soaked in flammable liquid to the tails of stray cats to spread the flames.