A wildfire has burned through almost a fifth of one of the world’s oldest nature reserves, the Forest of Fontainebleau southeast of Paris that served as the inspiration for some of France’s greatest artworks.Five hundred firefighters and water-bombing aircraft have been deployed to fight the fire, which forced the evacuation of 900 people from neighbouring villages and temporarily cut off motorways and trainlines into the capital.Authorities have pointed to arson as the potential cause of the fire, which spread rapidly southwards fuelled by wind and exceptionally dry conditions.“The fire had about 10 different points of origin within a radius of 1,000 metres, which makes us think that it may have been started deliberately,” interior minister Laurent Nunez told journalists, adding that an investigation was under way.“There are a certain number of factors that are, at the very least, troubling regarding the start of this fire.”It is one of multiple wildfires that are raging across France as the country endures its third heatwave of the year, with much of the country under alerts for extreme high temperatures reaching up to 40 degrees in places.Wildfires have so far burned through 32,000 hectares of land in France this year, already surpassing the entire toll of 2025.“Whether caused by negligence or deliberately, this fire ... is an ecological disaster,” Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure wrote on social media. “The lives of hundreds of firefighters are now at stake, local residents have been forced to evacuate and the whole of Seine-et-Marne is watching its historic forest heritage go up in smoke. It’s heartbreaking.”Preserved since antiquity as a royal hunting reserve, the Forest of Fontainebleau became the inspiration for the art movement known as the Barbizon school, which advocated working outdoors to capture scenes of nature and rural life and was named for a village on the edge of the wood.The deciduous forest and its surrounds appear in some of France’s most famous artworks, including Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners, several landscapes by Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet’s monumental Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.A campaign by the Barbizon artists against the felling of the forest’s old oaks and planting of non-native conifers led to its declaration as an artistic reserve in 1861, in effect becoming one of the world’s earliest nature reserves, making it a popular day destination for Parisians ever since.Frédéric Valletoux, a former mayor of Fontainebleau and lawmaker for the Seine-et-Marne region, told French television that 800 hectares of the forest had been burned and this would likely rise.“Given the winds and what the firefighters are saying, we should reach 1,000 hectares. That’s a fifth of the forest area,” Valletoux said.A farmer sprays water in the forest of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris. Photograph:Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/AFP via Getty Images “It was only three years ago that we started to realise that the risk of major fires could also exist in Fontainebleau.”The forest was the subject of a long appeal by the novelist George Sand, published in the newspaper Le Temps in 1871 and considered a pioneering work of environmentalism, which argued that the forest should be preserved like a national monument.“All the inhabitants of France have a direct interest in not allowing France to be stripped of its vast shade-giving forests, reservoirs of moisture necessary for the air they breathe and the soil they cultivate,” she wrote.“Nature is disappearing. Most of the vast expanses have shrunk. Where can one now find the forests of the Ardennes?” she wrote.“If we are not careful, the tree will disappear and the end of the planet will come about through desiccation, without the need for a single great cataclysm, through the fault of man.”Some ⁠26 million people in France were under a red heatwave warning on Monday. Forecasters say the heatwave is expected to continue until the middle of the week.A new heatwave, expected to last at least a week, is about to hit neighbouring Italy, bringing high humidity and tropical nights, meteorologists say. Thermometers in inland areas of Sardinia could reach 43 degrees on Tuesday.The death toll from last week’s wildfire in Spain’s southern province of Almeria reached 13 after a 93-year-old British woman died from burns on ​Sunday, with 10 people still missing as of Monday, according to authorities. European countries reported some 10,650 excess deaths during the record-breaking heatwave that engulfed the west of the continent in late June, official ​data showed.A separate scientific ⁠study published on Monday estimated 2,700 people died from heat-related causes in England and Wales alone during the May and June heatwaves.Of those deaths, 42 per cent were caused by the extra heat brought on by global warming, according to findings by Imperial College London, the UK Met Office and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. - Additonal reporting: Reuters