At noon in Le Porge, the temperature is about 35C and the air is thick with the acrid smell of ash, cinders and burnt wood. On the dry grass and sand outside the sports centre, 200 men and a handful of women sit at tables in the shrinking shade, eating plates of sausages, steak and potatoes. They are firefighters, soldiers, police, gendarmes, officials, first aid teams, foresters and volunteers.
The village was evacuated just over 14 hours after the “megafire” broke out 6km away last week. The blaze has consumed 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) of mainly forestland west of Bordeaux. It is now contained, but fresh outbreaks appear every day, stretching emergency services and the hundreds of amateurs who have come to help to their limits.
“We’ve turned a corner but we are very, very tired. We have gone beyond what we thought possible,” said a senior firefighter at Le Porge, drinking a litre of water in less than a minute. “We stared into an abyss.” The firefighter spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media.
A ‘zombie fire’ still burns underground
Overhead, three planes carrying tanks of water and retardant flew low towards new fires. A drone launched by the fire brigade buzzed nearby, using thermal cameras to detect the creeping underground blaze — described by local media as a “zombie fire” — that could bring fresh chaos in the coming days, weeks and months.
Roads around the village run through a smouldering, smoking and deserted landscape of charred but upright trees. In some places the forest is intact, with tall pines in neat green rows. In others, selected at apparent random by the flames, the trees have been reduced to ash and cinders as far as the eye can see.
“Now we are all running on adrenaline, but the crisis is going to pass and that’s when it will be really hard. That’s when we will weep,” said Remy Bossion, 46, whose home was damaged in the fire. He now spends his days helping to cut 200-metre-wide firebreaks through the remaining forest to slow any future outbreaks.
Fires across Europe
Elsewhere in France, the same weekend brought similar devastation. In the Var region, George and Amal Clooney were forced to evacuate their home as a wildfire burned nearby. Flames still threatened the forests of Fontainebleau outside Paris, as well as areas of Corsica and near Dijon.
Across Europe, emergency services are struggling. In the UK, 120 firefighters have spent three days tackling a blaze in Suffolk. In Spain, the cumulative number of fires in 2026 has set a new record for this time of year. In Greece, three firefighters died in Crete and thousands of tourists were evacuated from resorts.
Record heat and warnings
Data shows that fire weather across the EU has broken records for this time of year. Scientists say climate models have long predicted such extreme weather, although some disasters appear to be striking earlier and with more strength than expected.
“We still have a month or more of summer to go. We need rain, a lot of rain,” the senior firefighter said.
Political questions over resources
French leaders have been trying to reassure worried communities and avert a political crisis. On Thursday night, Sophie Brocas, the prefect of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region and the Gironde department, which includes Le Porge, said: “We are gradually getting back to normal.” President Emmanuel Macron said last week that it was not the time to analyse lessons while France was still in “full battle”.
No one doubts the scale of the megafire, which at one point reached the suburbs of Bordeaux itself, but its origins and the availability of resources to fight it are bitterly contested.
Blaze began with a spark
Nicolas Di Domenico, a local public works contractor eating at the makeshift canteen, learned of the blaze when his electricians working near Saumos called to say a spark from a faulty machine cleaning a high-tension cable had ignited a fierce blaze. He said: “It was a short circuit or something of that nature and immediately everything went up because it’s all so dry. The guys there tried to use a fire extinguisher but it was too intense. My guys basically ran for their lives and by the time the fire brigade turned up it was huge.”
The blaze initially overwhelmed firefighters, who had difficulty reaching the deeper forest where it was spreading. Within six hours it had travelled 6km (3.7 miles) to the outskirts of Le Porge. Early the next morning, burning cinders fell from a red sky as residents gathered in the streets, and the decision was made to evacuate.
“The authorities should have stopped all work in the forest. Someone got their priorities wrong,” Di Domenico said.
Criticism of preparations
Many in Le Porge and the region accuse the local administration of being “asleep at the wheel” before the fire, and then failing to commit enough resources quickly. They also ask why France’s ageing fleet of firefighting planes had not been replaced or reinforced. Sebastien Delavoux, head of the firefighting section of the CGT union, said: “We feared this for a long time, and were warning about the planes specifically since 2017. This summer has shown we have reached the extreme limit of what is possible for France’s firefighters.”
The mayor of Le Porge, Martial Zaninetti, said the village lost 20% of its homes and escaped further devastation only “by a miracle”. He described an event that was impossible to predict despite multiple warnings. “The conditions this year are totally exceptional. We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “You can always say it’s not enough, we’ve not got adequate resources, enough planes, or of whatever, but the scale is completely beyond anything we’ve seen before.”
Firefighters prepare for another night
On Wednesday evening, senior firefighters gathered around a map taped to the side of a fire engine at a base on the edge of the worst-hit zone. Burnt red by the sun and with notebooks in hand, sector commanders received their missions for the night, when lower temperatures and higher humidity make fighting easier. Younger team members, in soot-covered overalls, watched as their superiors greeted one another with black humour and bags of Haribo sweets.
“All right, my little chicken? Ready for another night of work? Not too much for you,” joked one officer to his replacement at the end of a 12-hour shift. “Are you planning your holidays already?” came the response.
One firefighter said the struggle with the megafire had shifted from a dynamic and dangerous “war of manoeuvre” to a long, slow and hard “war of attrition”. “We were on the defensive at the beginning but now it’s not spreading any more. There are still lots of individual outbreaks that have us running around and when everyone is exhausted, that is hard. So the mobilisation remains total,” he added.
On the long straight roads through the pines, summer tourist traffic has been replaced by convoys of fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, agricultural water tankers, lorries rigged with plastic containers and pickups carrying jerry cans connected to garden hoses. Some ferry water to fire engines so crews can remain at an outbreak without leaving to refill their tanks. Others spray roadsides or the wide white scars of new firebreaks cut through the forest.
Community solidarity in Lacanau
In the small resort town of Lacanau, just north of the worst-hit zones, volunteers at a makeshift pumping station set up by the sailing club refilled containers. Armand Fargeas, 51, who runs pleasure trips for tourists on Lacanau’s inland lake, said: “We’ve got 600 people in our WhatsApp group, which for a community like ours is a huge number. What’s really great is that you have every generation getting involved. We might not agree on politics, but the spirit of solidarity is amazing.”
Hotels and camping sites are empty after evacuation, bistros are shut, and rows of sailing boats and paddleboards sit drawn up on the shore. “We hope the tourists come back. It’s a catastrophe,” said Anne-Marie Nardou, 74, as she brought fruit and drinks to Fargeas and his friends.
Evacuees begin to return
Some of the roughly 200,000 people forced from their homes are now being allowed back. On Friday, an exhibition hall in Bordeaux, the regional capital, began to empty of hundreds of evacuees, though many still awaited permission. Tens of thousands of others remained with friends, relatives or in hotels.
Frédéric Farrugia, a 55-year-old financial adviser living in the coastal village of Lège, watched on his home’s security cameras as firefighters saved his building, though houses 50 metres away were destroyed. His wife Severine, woken by gendarmes at 2am, escaped with him and their cat and took a photo of the inferno that led to an offer of temporary accommodation from a wellwisher. “We were on the dual carriageway with these flames like a wall along one side. It was a bit like the apocalypse,” Farrugia said. “I think that now the French will realise that the climate is heating up and that we have to react.”
Climate warnings and the future
In Lacanau, carpenter Anthony Legrand said he had seen massive change over the decades: tides that reduce the width of the beach, green algae and repeated fires, including one in 2022 that devastated a swathe of forest near his home. “You’d think that would be a warning but no one paid attention,” he said. “It’ll be the same this time. They’ve got memories like goldfish.”
In Le Porge, Zaninetti said the “worst had passed for now” but the risk of a new megafire remained high, now and in coming years. “Right now, we need new shelter, clothes, insurance, legal support, doctors and psychologists,” he added. “But this is a problem for the long term. Unless we find another way to live with the forest, this will just happen again.”
