France has burned nearly 98,000 hectares (242,000 acres) this year. Its interior minister, Laurent Nunez, called that a historic record on Saturday, and the biggest of the fires driving it was still moving toward Bordeaux as he said it.
The Gironde fire has run since Wednesday and covered more than 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres). On Saturday morning it stood 40 to 50 km (25 to 30 miles) from the city. Smoke reached Bordeaux itself, and residents reported the smell of it. Seven towns to the west were told to evacuate overnight. One official told the BBC they were "far from having the fire under control."
The latest. Nunez put the Gironde evacuation at 167,000 people, 57,000 of them moved overnight, with another 30,000 out in neighboring Landes. The French government's combined figure is 197,000. Counting Spain, the BBC puts the total above 250,000.
President Emmanuel Macron asked the army to mobilize, calling it the worst wildfire France has ever seen, and asked the European Union for help.
The response is now partly military. There are 500 soldiers in the Gironde with another 500 expected, clearing brush and cutting firebreaks. There are 18 aircraft committed, Canadairs and Dash water-bombers among them, and on Saturday afternoon France put an A400M military transport into the operation for the first time.
Gironde is not the only front. In Landes, 550 firefighters are working a separate fire. In Var, in the southeast, about 1,000 are on a blaze of 3,250 hectares (8,030 acres) where authorities described the conditions as catastrophic and the fire as one that can no longer be controlled.
Spain declared a national emergency on Friday, its first over a wildfire according to international reports, covering the Community of Madrid and the province of Ávila. The interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, named the municipalities: Villa del Prado and San Martín de Valdeiglesias outside Madrid, and Burgohondo in Ávila. Operational command went to the Military Emergency Unit, the army formation Spain keeps for disasters.
Three major fires were burning near the capital, two of which merged on Friday. The regional government called the situation critical and said the fires had "the potential to continue advancing without the capacity for extinction." The interior ministry counted nearly 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) gone in the Madrid region and 13,000 to 15,000 more in Ávila.
Spanish evacuation figures climbed through the day, from more than 10,000 out of four municipalities on Friday to 70,000 from villages west of Madrid by Saturday.
Near València, firefighters putting out a blaze in the Salt de l'Aigua ravine at Manises found a man dead in his car. He is believed to have been in his seventies, according to local media reports carried by the BBC.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said there are "complex times ahead." He named Greece, Italy and Portugal among the countries sending crews and equipment, and a change in the weather outside Madrid gave Spanish firefighters some relief on Saturday. The wind did not do the same for France.
This is also not Spain's first loss this month. A fire in the south of the country killed at least 13 people in the second week of July, a separate emergency from the one now burning outside Madrid. Six of the victims had been identified by 13 July. In France, two firefighters died on 21 July fighting a blaze near an airport in the southwest, and 27 departments were under high fire risk that week.
The rest of the northern hemisphere
Canada is having the season that dwarfs all of this. By 20 July about 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) had burned, with close to 1,000 fires active and more than 200 of them out of control across virtually every province and territory. It is not a record: the 2023 season took nearly 18 million hectares. Canadian smoke has been drifting south for weeks, thick enough by 18 July to raise air-quality questions over the World Cup final in the United States.
Algeria fought 146 wildfires in a single 24-hour period on 21 July, during a heat wave, and had contained 127 of them.
Greece has been burning in several places at once, including the Pilio peninsula and the Derveni area near Thessaloniki. In Italy, fires on Sicily threatened a town, and Italian firefighting aircraft were sent across to Tunisia.
Türkiye has had a steady month rather than a catastrophic one. Fires have been fought and mostly contained in Muğla, Antalya, Adana, Balıkesir, İzmir and Adıyaman, and Bolu closed its forests to visitors. The agriculture and forestry minister, İbrahim Yumaklı, warned the public to stay out of fire zones.
The authorities in each country cite much the same causes: heat, drought and wind. Nunez's historic record is the figure for the whole year so far, and the year has reached 25 July.