Fires in Europe: latest developments

Here are the main developments related to the wildfires raging in Spain and France on Saturday:

France sends 500 more troops

France's government ordered 500 more soldiers to the wildfire zone in the southwest, bringing the total number deployed to 1,500.

The troops will assist with evacuating residents from areas threatened by the fires and help safeguard homes left unattended during the emergency, the defence ministry said.

Tour de France affected

Tour de France organisers announced that they were shortening the following day's final stage of the cycling race due to the wildfires ravaging southwest France.

"In a spirit of national solidarity with the areas and communities affected, it was decided to adapt the route for the final stage from Thoiry to Paris," organisers ASO said in a statement.

New crisis meeting

French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu is to chair a new crisis meeting of ministers later Saturday, his office said.

The last such meeting was held late Friday, and resulted in troops being deployed to help, and the despatch of an A400M military transport plane specially fitted with equipment to disperse 20 tonnes of fire retardant.

More than 250,000 evacuated

The wildfires have forced the evacuation of more than 250,000 people in total, authorities in both countries said.

The French government said 197,000 people were evacuated because of wildfires near Bordeaux. The Spanish interior ministry said a total of 70,000 people were evacuated from villages west of Madrid.

Record area burnt in France

Fires across France have burned nearly 98,000 hectares (242,163 acres), Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said, describing the total as a "historic record".

"There are still a number of fires across the country that have not yet been brought under control," he said, singling out major blazes in the southwestern departments of Gironde and Landes.

'Save lives': Sanchez

The priority is "to save your lives and protect inhabited areas", Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told reporters while visiting a village in the fire zone.

"We are going to have some complex hours ahead because although the temperatures have gone down, we do not know exactly how the wind will develop, how strong it will be."

25,000 hectares burned

Wildfires raging west of Madrid have burned up to 25,000 hectares, more than twice the surface area of the city of Paris, the Spanish interior ministry said.

Flames have ravaged nearly 10,000 hectares in the Madrid region and "between 13,000 and 15,000" in the neighbouring province of Avila, the ministry said in a message sent to journalists.

Paris sends 100 firefighters

Around 100 Paris firefighters were being deployed to southwest France to help battle raging wildfires, the head of the Paris Fire Brigade told AFP.

Arnaud de Cacqueray, commander of the Paris Fire Brigade, said the firefighters would primarily be involved in wildfire suppression operations.

Spain fire 'decreased'

The government delegation in Madrid said on X early Saturday that overnight conditions had "greatly aided the fight against the wildfires, which advanced little and decreased in intensity".

'Real opportunity'

With temperatures dipping around Madrid, "there is a real opportunity now to tackle this fire with some guarantee of success," the central government's delegate in the Spanish capital, Francisco Martin, told reporters late Friday.

But he warned that Saturday would be "difficult" as "the wind is expected to rise in the morning, with rather erratic gusts".

Fire moves towards Bordeaux

French authorities ordered the evacuation of towns near the southwestern city of Bordeaux "as a precaution", as wildfires moved towards the area.

The traffic information website Bison Fute urged drivers to avoid roads in the Gironde department, where Bordeaux is located, to free up access for emergency services.

Major NASA site hit

The massive wildfires forced NASA to evacuate one of its three global deep space communications facilities in Spain on Friday, impacting the agency's ability to communicate with space probes.

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