Over 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes as massive wildfires continue to rage across southwestern France and central Spain.
On Saturday officials ordered the evacuation of large parts of Bordeaux’s suburbs, including the areas of Le Haillan, Eysines and Merignac.
Bordeaux is the largest city in the southwestern region and France’s sixth-largest city overall.
“The fires which are hitting our country have reached a level that has never been seen before,” French prime minister Sebastien Lecornu wrote on X on Saturday.
The French army has also been drafted in to help with the crisis as the blaze showed no signs of slowing down.
Spanish and French officials warned that winds were likely to exacerbate the fires.
Madrid’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso said that it marked the “worst fire in the history of the region” and that conditions had been made worse by a combination of high temperatures, wind and the merging of blazes.
The city’s emergency management chief Carlos Novillo told reporters earlier Friday that the fire was “at its peak and… currently beyond the capacity of firefighters to contain”.
