Wildfires and Mass Evacuations Sweep Southern Europe
A severe heatwave has driven major wildfires across southern Europe, forcing mass evacuations from France to the Balkans. Around ten thousand people were moved from the French Pyrenees, and tens of thousands are under evacuation or shelter orders in Spain, where temperatures reached 43C. Fires are also burning in Portugal, Greece, Croatia and Albania, with tens of thousands of hectares scorched; the European Union has deployed a record number of firefighters and aircraft. It is the continent’s third major heatwave since May.
The scale of the response — a record EU firefighting deployment, aircraft criss-crossing borders — is the measure of a summer testing the limits of systems built for a cooler climate. The same anticyclone baking Britain has settled over the whole of western and southern Europe, delivering successive heatwaves that dry the land to tinder and turn a spark into a mass evacuation. The human cost accumulates in two ways: the immediate danger of the fires, and the slower toll of the heat itself, which killed thousands across the continent in May and June. For British holidaymakers heading south, and for a country under its own alerts, the scenes are both a warning and a glimpse of a shared future. Watch the containment of the French and Spanish fires, the death toll as it emerges, and whether the heat dome finally breaks.