Firefighters have been battling to bring the blazes under control in parts of France, Spain and Portugal, with summer temperatures that have allowed them to flourish expected to continue this week. In the Gironde region of southwestern France, more than 12,000 people were evacuated as strong winds thwarted efforts to contain a wildfire in pine forests. That fire and another just south of Bordeaux have destroyed nearly 10,000 hectares of land, up from 7,300 on Friday. “We have a fire that will continue to spread until it is stabilized,” said Vincent Ferrier, deputy mayor of Langon in Gironde. A resident living near La Teste-de-Buch in the Gironde described conditions as “post-apocalyptic”. “I’ve never seen this before,” he told the AFP news agency. In neighboring Spain, firefighters were battling a series of blazes after days of unusually high temperatures that reached 45.7 degrees Celsius. A Ryanair plane flew over a forest fire in the Mijas mountain range in Spain on Saturday, where more than 3,000 people were evacuated. Photo: Alvaro Cabrera/EPA In the south of the country, near the Costa del Sol, more than 3,000 people were evacuated from their homes due to a large fire near the town of Mijas. Many were taken to a shelter at a sports center, emergency services said. “The police were coming and going on the street with their sirens on and they told everyone to leave. Just leave. There are no directions where to go,” said British pensioner John Pretty, 83. Ashley Baker, a Brit who lives in Mijas, told the BBC: “There are about 40 houses in our area. Everyone was very nervous and stood outside or on the balconies watching it.” Holidaymakers on the beach in Torremolinos described large amounts of smoke rising from the hills, where several aircraft battled the blaze. Some of the worst fires have occurred in Portugal, where the pilot of a firefighting aircraft died on Friday when his plane crashed while on an operation in the Foz Coa region, near the Spanish border. It was the first death from fires in Portugal so far this year, which have injured more than 160 people this week and forced hundreds to evacuate. Portugal’s health ministry said 238 people died as a result of the heat between July 7 and 13, most of them elderly people with underlying illnesses. A firefighting helicopter flies over a wildfire near the village of Bustelo in Amarante, northern Portugal, on Saturday. Photo: Patrícia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images There was some respite on Saturday for firefighters in Portugal, where temperatures dropped slightly across most of the country after reaching around 40 degrees Celsius in recent days. “We’ve had big fires and we don’t want them to reactivate… We will maintain extreme vigilance this weekend,” emergency and civil protection authority commander Andre Fernandez told reporters. The fire season has hit parts of Europe earlier than usual this year after an unusually dry, warm spring left the ground parched. The fires have been fueled by extreme temperatures that experts attribute to climate change. Croatia and Hungary have also battled wildfires this week, as have California and Morocco. In Portugal, a total of 39,550 hectares (98,000 acres) were destroyed by fires from the start of the year to mid-June, more than three times the area in the same period last year, according to data from the Institute for Nature and Forest Conservation. . An area equivalent to nearly two-thirds of that has burned during wildfires in the past week.
