Europe’s Wildfires Burn On as the Heat Grips the Continent
The wildfires driven by southern Europe’s heatwave are still burning across Spain, France, Greece, Portugal and beyond. A blaze in Almería, in southern Spain, has killed at least twelve, with more than twenty missing, and tens of thousands have been placed under evacuation or shelter orders around fires on the Costa Brava and in the French Pyrenees. Temperatures have reached 43C in Spain, and firefighters from across the continent have been deployed under the EU’s civil-protection mechanism.
The same heat dome baking Britain has settled over the whole of southern and western Europe, drying the land to tinder and turning the Mediterranean summer into a season of evacuations, after the hottest June on record set the fires off early and hard. The cross-border firefighting effort is the measure of a continent stretching systems built for a cooler climate, and the human cost accumulates twice over — in the immediate danger of the flames and the slower toll of the heat, which killed thousands across Europe in June. For the many British holidaymakers heading to Spain, France and Greece this month, the fires are a direct concern, and for a country under its own alerts they are a glimpse of a shared future. Watch the containment of the Spanish, French and Greek fires, the confirmed death toll, and whether the heat finally breaks across the continent this week.