Photos: Spain and France's battle record wildfires

Updated July 28, 2026 at 11:34 AM EDT From Spain to southwestern France, around 330,000 people have been forced to flee their homes and holiday sites as some of Europe's worst wildfires of the summer spread across the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic coast. In France's Gironde region near Bordeaux and in wildfire-hit areas of Spain, flames are being fueled by extreme heat — and scientists say some fires are now creating their own weather systems, making them even harder to control. "You cannot stop a storm, so you will not stop a firestorm," says Jean-Baptiste Filippi, a fire-weather expert at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), or National Centre for Scientific Research.

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