Thousands of tourists forced to evacuate as fire rages in southwest France

More than 10,000 tourists had evacuated camping sites and other holiday accommodation in southwest France on Thursday, as a wildfire ravaged a seaside pine forest.

The blaze in Le Porge had ripped through 2,000 hectares – an area about three times the size of Gibraltar – since Wednesday, officials said.

In total, almost 12,000 people – including tourists as well as hundreds of residents from villages surrounding the forest – had been forced to leave the area overnight, the authorities said.

Skies in the coastal village of Le Porge, near the city of Bordeaux, were orange on Thursday morning.

Hundreds of firefighters were battling the fire, which started around midday on Wednesday then roared through the dense pine woodland, with flames soaring to 10 metres in some areas.

"We saw a huge cloud of black smoke spreading across the sky in the middle of the afternoon," Julie Leonard, a holidaymaker from Bordeaux, said on Wednesday.

Le Porge mayor Martial Zaninetti said the fire appeared to have been started by a brush-clearing machine.

Police said they were investigating the possibility of an accident that started the blaze.

France has been battered by three heatwaves since May as part of increasingly common extreme weather episodes linked to climate change, causing excess deaths, drying up rivers and fuelling wildfires.

Roaring flames in the UNESCO-listed Fontainebleau forest outside Paris last week also devastated 2,000 hectares, in a rare such fire so far north.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)