More than 1,000 firefighters in France are battling a "monster" wildfire near the wine-growing heartland of Bordeaux.
There have been several unprecedented fires in France and thousands of hectares were destroyed in the Gironde area of southwestern France on Wednesday.
This comes just two weeks after two significant blazes destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of forests in the same region that forced close to half a million people to flee their homes, according to official data.
"It's an ogre, it's a monster," Gregory Allione from the French firefighter's body FNSPF told RTL radio.
Many wildfires across the continent have broken out this summer, triggered by climate change fuelled heatwaves that have baked Europe and brought record temperatures.
"We are getting to a point of exhaustion for the firefighters," French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told reporters on Wednesday during a visit to the fire-battered department of Aveyron in southern France.
Close to 80 per cent of France's firefighters are volunteers, according to the latest data from the French Fire Fighter Service and the French government is calling on companies to make employees who are enlisted volunteer firefighters available throughout August to battle the blazes, as drought conditions continue.
"It's a disaster, economically, ecologically, it's awful," Jean-Louis Dartiailh, the mayor of Hostens, a small town close to the fire, told Radio Classique.
"The area is totally disfigured. We're heartbroken, we're exhausted."
More than 57,200 hectares have burnt so far in France this year, nearly six times the full-year average for 2006-2021, data from the European Forest Fire Information System shows.
The Gironde fire started on Tuesday and shows no signs of stopping, prompting the evacuation of 10,000 residents.
The main A63 highway between Bordeaux and Bayonne will be closed both ways, as the fire is "very virulent."
The flames have destroyed 16 houses but no injuries were reported, according to the press release.
"We are entering a difficult day with very high risks. The weather is extremely unfavourable at the moment," authorities said.
Across the EU and UK, around 63 per cent of the land is under either drought warnings or alerts, according to the European Union's European Drought Observatory on Wednesday.
The area affected is almost the same size as India, and greater than the three biggest US states combined - Alaska, Texas and California.
The EU's climate monitoring agency Copernicus said: "This new heatwave is associated with a robust high-pressure figure causing cloudlessness over much of western Europe.
"According to the national weather services, air temperatures between 9 and 14 August could again exceed 44C in Spain, 40C in France, 35C in the south of the United Kingdom and 30C in the Netherlands."
