Overview
- On Monday the Gironde fire was reported by local authorities as overall stable overnight while remaining roughly 15–17 kilometres from Bordeaux with the city’s evacuation plan activated and about 220,000–270,000 people affected.
- Spanish authorities say fires around Madrid, Ávila and Toledo have burned about 77,000 hectares, prompted a Situación Operativa 3 national emergency and allowed limited returns where frontlines show slow containment.
- France and Spain have deployed thousands of firefighters, police and soldiers and accepted international help including water-bombing aircraft from EU partners and a retrofitted A400M used to drop retardant.
- Officials and scientists point to extreme heat, prolonged drought and pyrocumulonimbus clouds that create their own winds and lightning, producing rapid, unpredictable fire behaviour that is stretching aerial and ground firefighting capacity.
- Hundreds of homes and tourist facilities have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands have been displaced, and forecasts of a new heatwave raise the short-term risk of renewed evacuations and further threats to infrastructure.