France sends boats to evacuate tourist hotspot Cap Ferret as wildfires rage

By Issy Ronald, Pierre P Bairin, CNN

(CNN) — French authorities ordered the complete evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula on Friday, launching boats to help rescue people from the popular tourist destination as wildfires tear across western Europe.

Evacuation boats operated from three piers on the peninsula, which is situated about 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of Bordeaux in southwestern France, the province’s prefect, Sophie Brocas, said Friday morning.

Such an operation demonstrates the severity of the wildfires currently ripping across parts of southern France and elsewhere in Europe, fueled by record-breaking, climate change-driven heat waves that have turned the landscape into a tinderbox.

Similar fierce wildfires in Spain have forced the government to declare a national state of emergency.

In France’s Cap Ferret alone, 40,000 people have been evacuated, according to the country’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, though only a few hundred of those were evacuated by sea.

Just one road connects the Hamptons-like peninsula to the mainland, making evacuation a priority in case fires cut off access to this road.

Residents described receiving text messages in the middle of the night telling them to evacuate. “(There are) firefighters everywhere, police everywhere, checking that people have indeed left their homes,” one resident told CNN affiliate BFMTV. “Just 200 meters, 300 meters from here, you can see the wall of flames around Lège … the flames are right there.”

Videos from the area show the sky shrouded in smoke, scorched vegetation and firefighters battling outbreaks that have sprung up in more residential areas.

The fire grew by up to 1,000 hectares (4 square miles) every hour overnight, said Marc Vermeulen, director of Gironde’s Fire and Rescue Service, on Friday.

“Because the fire was so powerful, it also threw off spot fires right into the center of the town while it was still on the outskirts. We also had burning embers that caused the fire to spread from house to house,” Vermeulen said.

Some 53 homes and one campsite have been burnt in the blaze, which 1,000 firefighters are battling, Brocas said

Another wildfire is also burning in the area near Biscarrosse, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Cap Ferret, which has already forced 23,000 people to be evacuated.

Other European Union countries have sent firefighting aircraft to help Paris fight the wildfires following a request for assistance from French President Emmanuel Macron.

“We will soon be able to count on reinforcements from two Croatian Canadair aircraft, two Portuguese Air Tractor ‌planes, as well as two heavy ⁠Black Hawk helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” Macron posted on X Friday.

Europe deals with wildfires every summer. But this year the continent has seen far more land burnt than the annual average for the same period, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

The situation is particularly bad in France, which has already recorded more than 300 wildfires this year, compared to an annual average of 93, according to the EFFIS. Currently, 32 wildfires are burning across the country, though some are much less serious than others, Nuñez told AFP Friday.

The climate crisis is driving hotter, drier weather, which sets the stage for fiercer fire seasons as it parches the landscape, sucking waters from rivers, lakes and soil.

The brutal record-breaking June heatwaves that struck Europe earlier this summer would have been “virtually impossible” without a human-driven climate crisis, according to an analysis by World Weather Attribution.

Fires rage in Spain

Thick plumes of wildfire smoke also darkened the sky above Spain on Friday as the country’s government declared a national emergency.

As of Friday afternoon local time, Spanish authorities said they had evacuated more than 19,000 people from a cluster of towns about 75 kilometers (47 miles) west of Madrid. Some of those included elderly care home residents and holidaymakers visiting campsites.

One evacuee, Enrique Martin, recalled running from his house and narrowly escaping the flames.

“It was a ball of fire and, if I’d been five minutes later, it would have wiped us out. My wife put her foot down and that proved crucial,” he told Reuters.

The fire is the worst in the Madrid region’s history as three separate blazes, fueled by hot and windy conditions, have merged together, according to the region’s leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

“It is true that it is 6,000 hectares (23 square miles),” she said. “In other regions, that amount of land may not seem like much, but in a region like this, with a high concentration of homes and population, it is a catastrophe.”

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CNN’s Laura Paddison and Duarte Mendonca contributed reporting.