Wildfires and Record Heat Force Mass Evacuations Across Europe
A severe heatwave has driven major wildfires across France, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Turkey, forcing mass evacuations. Around ten thousand people were moved in the French Pyrenees and tens of thousands were under evacuation or shelter orders around a blaze on Spain’s Costa Brava, with further evacuations near Thessaloniki in Greece. At least fourteen people have died so far, and hundreds of firefighters from more than a dozen countries have been deployed. June was western Europe’s hottest on record.
The same anticyclone baking Britain has settled over the whole of southern and western Europe, delivering successive heatwaves that dry the land to tinder and turn a spark into a mass evacuation, and the record-breaking June is the backdrop that made this fire season start early and burn hard. The scale of the cross-border response — firefighters and aircraft moving between countries under the EU’s civil-protection mechanism — is the measure of a continent stretching systems built for a cooler climate. The human cost accumulates twice over: the immediate danger of the fires, and the slower toll of the heat itself, which killed thousands across Europe in June. For British holidaymakers heading to the Mediterranean, and for a country under its own alerts, the scenes are both a warning and a shared future. Watch the containment of the French, Spanish and Greek fires, the death toll as it is confirmed, and whether the heat finally breaks.