Firefighters held a vast wildfire inside its perimeter in southwestern France on Saturday, allowing about 198,000 people to return home after what may have been the country’s largest peacetime evacuation, even as renewed fires forced thousands from their homes elsewhere in France and Greece.
In the Mediterranean Var, a fire thought to have stopped advancing raced across 10 square kilometers (4 square miles) in six hours on Friday — “faster than a horse at full gallop,” the prefecture said.
The opposing movements — mass returns in France’s Gironde region, renewed displacement in the Var and boat evacuations from a Greek resort — underscored how quickly days of firefighting progress can be reversed.
At their peak, fires in France and Spain alone drove some 330,000 people from homes and vacation sites, stretching firefighters, aircraft and emergency services across simultaneous crises.
Europe is Earth’s fastest-warming continent, heating at more than twice the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus climate service. Rising temperatures and prolonged drought dry vegetation, allowing fires to spread faster and burn more intensely.
