PARIS (GNP): More than 43,000 people have been pulled out of southwestern France as wildfires continue tearing through the Gironde region, with authorities ordering a total evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula, one of the country’s best-known summer destinations. Boats began ferrying people off the peninsula early Friday, while those still on land were told to leave by the only road connecting the area to the mainland.
The evacuation wasn’t optional, and it wasn’t gentle. Sophie Brocas, prefect for the Nouvelle Aquitaine region, said evacuees could board boats from piers in four villages between 7 am and 10 am local time, after which no one was meant to be left behind, not in a region packed with campsites, rental homes and tourists mid-vacation. Local prefect officials confirmed 53 homes had already been lost, along with a campsite, though roughly 2,000 houses had so far been spared.
Behind the peninsula evacuation sits a fire that Interior Minister Laurent Nunez has called the largest of the season, one that broke out near Saumos on Wednesday and has since burned through more than 10,000 hectares. “The fire continues to spread; it is difficult to contain,” Nunez said, and by Friday morning it showed no sign of slowing. Around 40,000 people have been evacuated because of that blaze alone, according to Nunez, with roughly 800 firefighters, military engineering units, and helicopters now committed to fighting it.
A second, separate fire near Biscarrosse in the neighboring Landes region has burned more than 2,500 hectares and forced out over 23,000 more people, about 18,000 from Biscarrosse itself and another 5,000 from Parentis-en-Born, including residents of a nursing home and a summer camp. Landes prefect Gilles Clavreul told BFM TV the fire remained “out of control” after spreading further overnight, a description echoed by fire and rescue chief Marc Vermeulen, who said the blaze accelerated sharply late Thursday into Friday, prompting the additional evacuation of the town of Arès.
One family caught in the middle of it was headmaster David Morton’s, vacationing from Gloucester with his wife and sons in a rental house in Petit Piquey on the peninsula. An emergency text and a call to the property’s landline woke them at 3am, and within minutes they were packing the car and joining what Morton described as a long, slow-moving line of traffic, lit only by headlights and passing emergency vehicles. “You could see the whole forest was on fire and that really brought it home what a major fire it was,” he said, calling the evacuation itself well-organized despite the scale of what was unfolding around them.
Civil Security Director Julien Marion offered part of the explanation for why authorities have leaned so heavily on preventive evacuations this season: both fires, he said, have behaved in ways that are “totally unpredictable,” spreading and shifting direction with unusual speed. Nearly 50,000 hectares have burned across France since the wildfire season began, Marion said, calling it entirely unprecedented — a assessment Nunez repeated when describing the Gironde fire specifically as the country’s worst this year.
President Emmanuel Macron, who called the situation in Gironde “very tense,” has since asked the European Union to activate its civil protection mechanism. Reinforcements are now on the way: two Croatian Canadair water bombers, two Portuguese Air Tractor planes, and heavy Black Hawk helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. France’s aerial firefighting fleet, Nunez noted, has already logged two and a half times the flight hours, water drops and missions it managed across the entirety of last year’s wildfire season.
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Elsewhere in the country, a wildfire near Cotignac in the Var department has stabilized but remains uncontained, with more than 950 firefighters and water-bombing aircraft still working the blaze. France’s national forest fire service placed Haute-Garonne under its highest wildfire alert Friday, while 27 departments, including Gironde, Landes and Var among them, remain under orange alert for elevated fire risk. Two firefighters died Tuesday battling a separate blaze near Bordeaux airport, though no further casualties have been reported since.
The fires in France are unfolding against a wider backdrop of extreme heat across Europe. Three successive heatwaves this season have deepened drought conditions, strained water supplies and left vegetation dangerously dry, contributing to more land burning across the continent already this year than the annual average of the past two decades.
Spain has been hit just as hard: Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared a national emergency Friday as fires burned out of control west of Madrid, near Villa del Prado, San Martín de Valdeiglesias and Burgohondo, forcing more than 10,000 evacuations of their own. “The government has deployed all available resources,” Sánchez said. “It will stand by your side during the emergency and in the recovery.”
Back in Gironde, Nunez struck a similar note. “Our security forces are engaged in a genuine battle against the wildfires,” he said. “The nation stands with you.”
Managing Editor at Global News Pakistan (GNP), with a Bachelor's degree in International Relations from Riphah International University, graduated with a Gold Medal. Reach out at sabahtareengnp@gmail.com
