Wildfires burning across south-western France and central Spain have forced more than 265,000 people from their homes, with the main fire in France's Gironde department about 30 kilometres from Bordeaux after the wind turned back toward the city at midday on Saturday.
Around 198,000 of those evacuations are across the French departments of Gironde, Landes, Var and Tarn. President Emmanuel Macron has mobilised the military, and a military cargo aircraft has been dropping flame retardant on the fires.
Figures have climbed steadily through the day. The BBC reported more than 300,000 evacuated on Saturday evening; earlier counts ranged from 200,000 to 267,000. Expect the number to move again.
Cap Ferret, and the road out
The starkest sequence has been on the Cap Ferret peninsula south of Bordeaux, where roughly 44,000 people left over two days.
The peninsula has one road off it, and the flames threatened it. Boats were used to move hundreds of people out by water. More than 50 houses have been destroyed there, and the fire north of Arcachon Bay has burned through more than 12,500 hectares of forest.
An evacuation by sea because the only land route is on fire is the kind of detail that conveys the situation more precisely than any hectare figure.
Spain
Spain's interior ministry reported close to 10,000 hectares burned in the Madrid region and between 13,000 and 15,000 hectares in the neighbouring province of Ávila.
The one confirmed death so far is in Spain: a 78-year-old man in Manises, north-west of Valencia. He had reduced mobility and was caught by the fire near his orchard.
Officials have described casualty and damage figures as provisional. In fires moving at this speed across this much ground, that caution is meaningful rather than formulaic.
The Tour de France was cut short
France shortened the final stage of the Tour de France in order to redeploy security personnel to the fires.
For a country that treats the Tour's closing stage as a national fixture, altering it mid-event is a plain statement of where the emergency ranks. It is also a practical measure: the police and gendarmes who line a race route are the same people needed to run roadblocks and evacuations several hundred kilometres away.
The conditions
Temperatures in parts of southern Europe have topped 40°C (104°F), which is the underlying reason these fires have moved as they have. Heat dries fuel, low humidity keeps it dry, and wind decides where it goes — the shift at midday that turned the Gironde fire back toward Bordeaux being the immediate example.
This is a developing story. Evacuation totals, casualty figures and the position of the fires are changing through the day and are subject to revision by French and Spanish authorities.
