Nearly 270,000 people have fled wildfires raging across Spain and France, with authorities struggling to contain blazes that have burned tens of thousands of hectares and killed at least 14 people this year.
Spain declared a national emergency on July 24 as two large fires merged west of Madrid into a single inferno that emergency chief Carlos Novillo said was at its peak and impossible to extinguish. Regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso called it the worst fire in the region's history. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited an operations centre near the capital, while NASA evacuated a ground station at Robledo.
In France, an area roughly four times the size of Paris burned in Gironde, with around 200,000 displaced. Both nations activated the European Union's civil protection mechanism, and water-bombing aircraft from Croatia, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were dispatched to assist.