Tour de France final stage cut as police join Bordeaux wildfire battle

Lege-capferret,UPDATED: Jul 25, 2026 22:00 IST

France has cut the final stage of the Tour de France by about a third so police officers can be redeployed to fight wildfires in the country’s southwest, where tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, including from parts of Bordeaux’s western suburbs.

The move came as authorities stepped up efforts against a major blaze in the Gironde region, deploying a specially adapted A400M military transport aircraft to drop flame retardants. Across southern Europe, wildfires this week have displaced more than 250,000 people, including about 70,000 in central Spain.

The Paris police department said Sunday’s last stage of the Tour will now be held entirely inside Paris on an 89-kilometre circuit, instead of starting from Thoiry, west of the capital, and covering the originally planned 133-kilometre route. Part of the race’s security detail will instead be used “to reinforce the response efforts in the areas affected by the wildfires”, it said.

French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the A400M would join 18 other planes and helicopters dropping water and retardants in what he described as an expected “long and very difficult” battle against the Gironde fire. He said the blaze was about 30 kilometres west of Bordeaux and had eased somewhat overnight, but warned that winds were expected to shift from west to east on Saturday afternoon, potentially pushing the fire closer to the city. Fire crews and authorities were digging trenches, using retardants and taking other steps to try to stop its advance, he said.

The government also mobilised soldiers and was rushing 1.5 million face masks to help protect people from heavy smoke. Authorities ordered evacuations in areas between the fire and Bordeaux, including parts of Le Haillan, Eysines and Mrignac, where the city’s airport is located. The airport remained open, but said its bus and tram services had been suspended.

Prime Minister Sbastien Lecornu described the fires as unprecedented and said the Gironde blaze had become so powerful on Friday that it started generating its own winds. “Our priority is clear: protecting human lives,” he posted on X, adding that evacuation orders “must be respected without delay.” He said firefighting teams were being reinforced with hundreds of soldiers and that breathing masks were being rushed to the Gironde region for people exposed to potentially harmful smoke.

The French military transport aircraft adapted for firefighting adds a much larger tool to the operation. In tests, it carried and dropped 20 tonnes of water, around three times the capacity of Canadair water-bombing planes that are widely used in such operations.

In Spain, 2,600 firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel were deployed to two blazes west of Madrid, backed by 19 aircraft and helicopters. France deployed 1,300 firefighters to the Gironde fire and another blaze farther south in the Landes region. Authorities said dozens of firefighters were injured, but no deaths were reported in either country despite scenes of panic as residents fled by car and police went door to door telling people to leave.

The fires in France and Spain spread with unusual speed and intensity. In France, some people fled by boat when flames swept through tourist towns on the Atlantic coast. In Spain, firefighters said the blazes were moving too fast and violently to be tackled head-on. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Javier Organista, a resident of El Tiemblo, west of Madrid, where fire damaged a well-known chestnut grove. “When we saw the flames coming into our town, surrounding us, leaving us with practically no way out, all the neighbours joined together to try to stop its advance.” He added: “It’s just really sad.”

Successive heatwaves that arrived unusually early and severely this year, bringing record high temperatures across Europe, have turned forests and scrubland into tinderboxes. The article said the fires were fuelled by high temperatures and the long-term effects of climate change. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said 130,000 hectares of forest had already burned in Spain this year, compared with an average of 100,000 hectares annually over the past decade. Visiting a command post west of Madrid on Saturday, he said more favourable weather had opened “a window of opportunity” for crews to bring the fires under control. Madrid’s regional government said the blazes had weakened as winds and temperatures fell.

Other European countries were also helping. Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia had either already sent, or were expected to send, water-dropping planes and helicopters to support operations in Spain and France.

Gironde prefect Sophie Brocas said on Friday night that strong westerly winds were pushing the fire towards the Bordeaux metropolitan area and that it had reached “an unprecedented magnitude”. The blaze started on Wednesday near the Cap Ferret peninsula on France’s Atlantic coast, about 60 kilometres from Bordeaux. The city took in thousands of evacuees at an exhibition centre, offering food and shelter, and the mayor said the site could be prepared to receive as many as 10,000 people if needed. Brocas said evacuation orders were sent through special mobile phone alerts. “We want everyone to be quickly brought to safety. We must act quickly together,” she said.

The shortened Tour de France stage, the deployment of military aircraft and soldiers, and mass evacuations in France and Spain underlined the scale of the wildfire crisis, as authorities worked to protect residents and contain fires moving towards populated areas.

With PTI Inputs

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