By Alexandre Dimou
ILLE-SUR-TET, France, July 6 (Reuters) – A wildfire burning out of control in southern France has forced the evacuation of over 10,000 people from two dozen small towns and villages near the Spanish border, and officials said on Monday strong winds would further fan the flames.
The European Union said on Monday it was sending four waterbombing aircraft to France from Cyprus and Sweden, and more than 100 firefighters, to help emergency teams in Trevillach near the city of Perpignan.
“Europe stands with France,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on X.
The blaze has injured 16 people, including four firefighters, and scorched some 4,600 hectares (11,367 acres) in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, local prefect Pierre Regnault de la Mothe said in a post on X.
Early summer heatwaves in France and across western Europe in May and June have parched vast areas of land, making them particularly vulnerable to wildfires this year.
The Trevillach blaze was burning near the third stage of the Tour de France, leading to its closure to the public on Monday to allow firefighters easy access to the area, according to Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme.
The motorcade of vehicles that follows the race was also kept to a minimum, he said. The stage, which is 196 km (122 miles) long, began in the Spanish city of Granollers and ends in Les Angles, in the Pyrenees-Orientales region of France.
Europe is warming at more than twice the global average, the World Meteorological Organization has said, making prolonged heat episodes increasingly likely.
Temperatures are forecast to once again hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in southwest France this week, with Portugal and Spain also baking under another heatwave, but are unlikely to reach the record highs seen in June.
On the Spanish side of the border, the fire ravaged 2,200 ha — 97% of them in the protected natural area of Les Gavarres — although regional authorities said over the weekend that it was stable and would be completely extinguished during the week.
Police have arrested an employee of a company contracted by Catalonia’s regional government who is suspected of having sparked the wildfire by using an angle grinder at the side of a road.
South of Catalonia, in the eastern Castellon province, 500 people were evacuated after a wildfire entered the Sierra de Espadan national park, home to a significant cork oak forest.
Portugal has suffered hundreds of blazes in the last few days, with the biggest already burning through 10,000 ha of land – the size of around 14,000 football pitches.
(Reporting by Inti Landauro, David Latona and Dominique Vidalon; editing by Richard Lough, Gareth Jones and Andrei Khalip)
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