Firefighters were stretched across southern France as several wildfires raced along the country's Mediterranean coast, fanned by strong winds and fed by land left tinder-dry by a record heatwave. The blazes forced thousands of people from their homes and holiday campsites, turning a stretch of the summer south into an emergency zone.
The scale of the response was substantial. Around 2,000 firefighters were deployed to battle the fires, working in difficult conditions after the extreme heat that had baked much of Western Europe for more than a week left vegetation parched and highly flammable.
The government detailed the extent of the damage. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said three separate blazes, two of which had broken out on the western edge of the port city of Marseille, had together scorched a combined area of about 1,210 hectares.
The single biggest fire was burning further west. It was located in the Aude department, near the border with Spain, where roughly 900 hectares had been burned and around 800 firefighters were struggling against high winds that made the flames harder to contain.
The danger drove large-scale evacuations along the coast. In Frejus, a resort town in the Var department not far from Cannes, more than 2,000 people were evacuated from six campsites as a forest fire burned nearby.
Another resort was also hit hard. In the seaside town of Canet-en-Roussillon, spreading flames forced the evacuation of some 1,500 people from three campsites, and the fire tore through hundreds of mobile homes as it advanced.
Scientists have linked the heightened danger directly to the heat. The World Meteorological Organization warned that the record temperatures which gripped Western Europe in late June would worsen the risk of wildfires, pointing to the combination of sustained high heat, very low humidity and dry vegetation.
The outlook offered little immediate relief. With another heatwave forecast to build over the coming days, authorities warned that the fire risk would remain elevated, keeping crews on alert across the south as they worked to bring the current blazes under control.