More than 300,000 people were evacuated from homes and holiday accommodation across France and Spain by Sunday, 26 July 2026, as wildfires tore through both countries at the same time, destroying houses and killing at least one person in eastern Spain (The Guardian).

New evacuation orders were issued around Bordeaux and Madrid on 26 July. Spanish authorities ordered new evacuations near Toledo, south-west of the capital. Authorities warned of another difficult night ahead as major fires continued to burn. People who fled the flames slept on camp beds in exhibition halls and gymnasiums.

The French evacuation is being described as one of the largest peacetime civilian evacuations ever carried out in the country. In the Gironde area alone, officials triggered the FR-Alert system on 24 July. This is France's emergency alert system that sends warnings directly to people's phones. Nearly 20,000 people were evacuated from the towns of Le Porge, Saumos, Le Temple, and Lège-Cap-Ferret (Gironde Prefecture). The prefecture also reported evacuating a beach at Le Porge involving 600 vehicles, and a neighborhood involving 600 people.

The largest wildfire in France, near Arcachon Bay and the Cap-Ferret peninsula in Gironde, had burned more than 8,700 hectares according to the Gironde prefecture (Reuters). For context, 8,700 hectares is roughly the size of 12,000 football fields. Forty-two firefighters were injured in the Gironde operations, with nine evacuated in relative urgency (Gironde Prefecture). By 23 July, nearly 40,000 people had been evacuated across the Gironde and Landes areas combined.

The Gironde fire service reported that the wildfire generated a rare pyrocumulonimbus cloud. This is a phenomenon where the heat from the fire is so intense that it creates its own weather system. The hot air rises fast, cools at high altitude, and forms a cloud that can produce its own winds and whirlwinds. It is like a thunderstorm created by the fire itself. This made the fire unpredictable and much harder to control, because its behavior was driven by the weather it generated rather than the weather around it.

The crisis in France goes well beyond Gironde. A major wildfire began on 12 July in the Fontainebleau forest in Seine-et-Marne, burning approximately 10% of the forest. This prompted the evacuation of roughly 167,000 people according to the Interior Ministry's report dated 24 July (French Interior Ministry). Wildfires have been affecting multiple areas in southern France since 1 July, with nearly 3,000 people evacuated in coastal communities and rural areas by 2 July (Euronews). On 7 July, France's weather service, Météo-France, placed 61 departments on high fire risk and three departments on very high fire risk.

In Spain, Protección Civil reported 188 people evacuated in Grazalema (Cádiz) due to a forest fire on 12 July. The agency had earlier issued an alert on 3 July for very high and persistent temperatures starting 5 July, with temperatures of 35 to 37°C expected in Rías Baixas, and warned that forest fire risk would remain very high or extreme across almost all of Spain in the coming days. Spanish Civil Protection monitoring reports documented fires across multiple regions earlier in the year, including Luena (Cantabria), Totana (Región de Murcia), Ponteareas (Pontevedra, Galicia), and Murcia.

The evacuee count climbed rapidly in the final days of the crisis. Reuters, reporting from Bordeaux and Madrid on 25 July, confirmed that hundreds of thousands had been evacuated across both countries (Reuters). Al Jazeera placed the figure at more than 267,000 on the same date, while CNN reported more than 250,000. By 26 July, The Guardian's figure exceeded 300,000, as evacuation zones continued to expand.

The broader context here is a wildfire season that began earlier than usual and has placed enormous strain on emergency services on both sides of the Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates France and Spain. The Fontainebleau fire alone forced the evacuation of a population comparable to a mid-sized French city. The appearance of a fire-generated weather system in Gironde points to fire intensity levels that overwhelm standard firefighting tactics. The combination of advance weather warnings from both France and Spain, the geographic spread of the fires, and the fact that they have lasted for weeks suggests that European fire authorities are facing conditions that severely test even the most experienced emergency response systems. Houses have been destroyed in both countries, and with authorities warning of further difficult conditions ahead, the situation remains unpredictable.