Photos: Spain and France's battle record wildfires

This photograph shows the building of a painting company destroyed by a wildfire in a business park in Biscarrosse, southwestern France, on July 28, 2026. Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images 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. Europe, the world's fastest-warming continent, is facing increasingly frequent and intense fire seasons, heating at more than twice the global average according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The Gironde wildfire alone has burned land equivalent ...