Evacuation of suburbs in the French city of Bordeaux as wildfires intensify

French authorities evacuated thousands of people from suburbs near Bordeaux on Saturday, as there were no signs of a decline in the intensity of wildfires in areas surrounding the city.

Sophie Broca, who heads the local administration of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Gironde region encompassing Bordeaux, said that evacuation operations were underway in the areas of Lormont, Eysines, and Mérignac. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu stated that more than 141,000 people had been evacuated so far from the Gironde and Landes departments, which are located near Bordeaux, where wildfires broke out last week.

Lecornu wrote on X on Saturday, “The fires ravaging our country have reached an unprecedented level.”

According to data from the Reuters Climate Observatory, the average temperature so far this month reached 32.2 degrees Celsius in the broader Aquitaine region, which is 7.3 degrees Celsius higher than the usual average maximum temperatures for July during the 1961–1990 period.