France withdraws from the outskirts of Bordeaux

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

Sophie Broca, who heads the local administration for the Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Gironde region, which includes Bordeaux, said that evacuation operations were underway in the areas of Lavoûte, Izin, and Mérignac.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu stated that more than 141,000 people had been evacuated so far from the Gironde and Landes regions, 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 was 32.2 degrees Celsius in the broader Aquitaine region, which is 7.3 degrees Celsius higher than the average maximum temperatures typically recorded in July between 1961 and 1990.