Wildfires raging across Spain and southwestern France have forced around 330,000 people to flee their homes and holiday sites, as record-breaking blazes tear through both countries. The fires, which intensified in late July 2026, have prompted Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to declare that "the climate emergency kills", underscoring growing concern that Europe's rapid warming is fuelling increasingly extreme and unpredictable fire behaviour.

The Gironde fire near Bordeaux has alone burned an area four times the size of Paris and displaced 220,000 residents, while further blazes have struck Spanish provinces including Ávila and Madrid. Firefighters, including Spain's specialist BRIF forest fire brigades, have been using controlled burns to try to halt the flames' spread, though some fires are now large enough to generate their own weather systems, making them extremely difficult to contain. Experts note Europe is warming more than twice as fast as the global average, with one fire-weather specialist warning that such "firestorms" are as uncontrollable as an actual storm.