The smell of burning is so strong inside her Bordeaux flat that Karen Kissane, a British expat, keeps the windows closed even as the mercury rises. Ash has appeared in her doorway. The 51-year-old from Newcastle returned from holiday to find the city ‘eerie’, with quiet streets in peak tourist season and a white sky overhead. Fires raging in the Gironde region are now just nine miles from the city centre, forcing the evacuation of more than 220,000 people in south-west France alone.
French interior minister Laurent Nuñez said the situation remained ‘very unfavourable’ and that the fire had become ‘extremely virulent and unpredictable’, generating its own wind and spreading erratically towards Bordeaux. Captain Nicolas Braz, a firefighting leader, described the blaze as creating ‘its own winds – complete with whirlwinds’, adding that it was ‘erratic and unmanageable’. More than 150 houses have been destroyed in the coastal town of Le Porge, where volunteer Nathalie Augonnet said, ‘I think many of them have never experienced a fire of this magnitude before.’
“More than 330,000 evacuated as wildfires rage in France and Spain, with flames within nine miles of Bordeaux.”
Across the border in Spain, prime minister Pedro Sánchez warned that the country and the Iberian peninsula were suffering the effects of the climate emergency. Two major fires near Madrid merged into a single blaze that has scorched 77,000 hectares in central Spain. Evacuee Olga Congacha, 50, said she felt ‘panicked’ when told to leave her village of Robledo de Chavela. Another evacuee, Rocío Domínguez, described the escape as ‘the apocalypse’, with cars clogging streets and ash covering everything.
Amid the chaos, police in Eysines, Gironde, arrested a man on Saturday evening who was allegedly stealing 44 bottles of fine wine from an evacuated house. The suspect, already known to police, was stopped in front of an empty home at 6.15pm.
Further north, a separate wildfire has been burning for 10 days in the Cairngorms National Park in the Scottish Highlands. More than 500 firefighters have been tackling the blaze, which forced residents to flee as suffocating smoke engulfed properties. Community council chairman Sandy McCook described an ‘apocalyptic’ pall of smoke. Duncan Ferguson, a resident in Glenmore, said police instructed people to ‘leave your pets and go’. Police Scotland declared a major incident and warned powerful winds were making the fire unpredictable.
French president Emmanuel Macron has scheduled an inter-ministerial crisis meeting for Monday morning, posting on X: ‘We will rebuild, we will repair, and we will be there as long as it takes.’ For now, evacuees like Kissane wait – unsure when they can return home, and what will be left.
