COTIGNAC, FRANCE – JULY 21: Bystanders watch the smoke and flames from a wildfire on July 21, 2026 in Cotignac, France. Over 1,000 firefighters were called in to control the fast-moving wildfire that has burned more than 2,500 hectares in southern France. (Photo by FBM Media/Getty Images)
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Wildfires are ravaging southern France and spreading into Spain, forcing more than 300,000 people to flee ahead of further expected heatwaves during the week.
French President Emmanuel Macron is set to hold a crisis cabinet meeting on Monday, while Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will visit areas hit by fires in Valencia, in the East of Spain.
The fire, which began in the Southwest of France in Gironde on Wednesday, has burned 42,000 hectares and has forced one of the largest evacuations in France’s history, according to French broadcaster France 24 and local news outlets. The wildfires have also affected 77,000 hectares of the Avila and Toledo areas in Western Madrid.
“The situation remains highly unfavorable,” France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on X on Saturday, according to a Google translation. “At the start of the night, in Gironde, the fire became extremely virulent and unpredictable again, generating its own wind and spreading erratically toward the Bordeaux metropolitan area. By the end of the night, it had calmed down somewhat.”
On Saturday, France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the wildfires are a “historic situation” for the country, with nearly 100,000 hectares burned at the time – an “unprecedented” level.
Spain’s Military Emergencies Unit (UME) and Castilla-y-Leon unit’s firefighters battle a fire in a forest next to La Atalaya residential area in El Tiemblo, 80 kms west of Madrid, on July 25, 2026 amid wildfires that have burned up to 25,000 hectares. Spanish firefighters hoped to get control of wildfires raging near Madrid on Saturday but an official warned that erratic winds threatened to fan the blazes further. The worst wildfires in the Madrid region’s history rage west of the Spanish capital, forcing authorities to evacuate or order around 60,000 people to remain indoors. (Photo by Cesar MANSO / AFP via Getty Images)
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Since the start of the disaster, 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 military personnel, and nearly 1,200 police have been deployed to bring the fire under control, Nunez said.
In the latest developments, the main government centre for the Bordeaux area known as the Gironde prefecture, said Monday, “the situation remained generally stable during the night from Sunday to Monday, with no major developments to report.”
The gigantic fire has been labelled an extremely dangerous and rare “pyrocumulonimbus” — a type of fire cloud which generates its own winds and whirlwinds, making it “erratic and unmanageable,” Nicolas Braz, a firefighter Captain, told AFP.
Artificial landscape exacerbates fires
Stefan Doerr, a professor of wildland fire science at Swansea University, said climate change and poor landscape management are contributing to the increasing intensity of the fires.
“Climate change plays a major role in this, and better management certainly means that we should manage the landscape better for not propagating fire through it,” Doerr said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”
The abandonment of agricultural land in parts of southern Europe, especially in the Mediterranean and parts of Madrid, has allowed flammable grasses, shrubs and dense forests to spread, making fires harder to contain during extreme heat and drought, Doerr said.
“And that simply means if we have these extreme weather conditions, these extreme droughts, if there is an ignition, it just becomes much more difficult to fight,” Doerr said.
Additionally, Doerr told CNBC Europe has been shaped by thousands of years of agriculture and human activity, with many forests now consisting of dense conifer plantations that are more prone to wildfires.
TOPSHOT – An Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Boss aircraft dumps water over a wildfire burning near San Martin de Valdeiglesias, about 70km west of Madrid, on July 26, 2026. Spanish firefighters today battled a new front of fires near the coastal city of Valencia, where at least 15,000 people were evacuated. In the western Madrid region, two separate wildfires merged on July 24 into a massive blaze that nearly joined another fire in neighboring Castile and Leon. The flames have already burned 25,000 hectares across Madrid and neighboring Avila province, forcing more than 60,000 people (a downwardly revised figure) to flee their homes, according to authorities, who labeled the fire the “worst in history” for the Madrid region. (Photo by Cesar MANSO / AFP via Getty Images)
Cesar Manso | Afp | Getty Images
“If we had a natural landscape, we would have actually, in some places, at least far less flammable forests,” he said. “This is man-made. It’s not that the plants are not natural, but the way the landscape looks now is entirely artificial.”
Doerr said Europe isn’t necessarily unprepared for wildfires as they occur every year in the Mediterranean regions.
“What is so unusual, really, is that we’ve now [had] the third consecutive heatwave that really dried out the landscape, and that means once we have an ignition, that can really escalate into a very severe fire,” he said. “The overall scale of the events now is beyond the capability of dealing with it effectively.”
Doerr acknowledged that Europe has strengthened its firefighting capacity, but argued it has not made enough progress in reducing wildfire risk before blazes start.
“This is essentially [about] better land management, better preparation for fires, better communication, and also better science compared to just better firefighting resources, which, as we see now, are just too far stretched,” he said.
