The number that should stop a reader is not the acreage. It is the word fourth.
France entered its fourth heat wave of 2026 on July 28, in a year that is seven months old, with temperatures forecast to hit 40C in the days following [1]. Spain's own next heat wave was due July 29, hotter still.
The fires are already there to meet it.
Roughly 800 square kilometres of central Spain have burned - about 310 square miles, concentrated in Toledo and Avila provinces - and 116,000 people have left their homes since the fires began [1].
In France, more than 250,000 have been evacuated from Gironde, the wine-growing region around Bordeaux, and nearly 4,000 more were moved out of the Lacanau area today alone [1].
We put the combined evacuation figure at more than a quarter of a million on July 25. Three days later the Spanish total alone has reached 116,000, and France has moved nearly 4,000 more out of Lacanau.
Two things went right this week, and they belong in the account.
Spanish authorities let residents of nine of the eleven evacuated towns in Toledo province go home, and Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said people 'can be a little more at ease' after overnight progress [1]. The account reports no deaths or injuries.
That is the state of things going into the heat.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the fires 'the most painful expression of a climate emergency' [1] - the political framing, and also, on the arithmetic of a fourth heat wave before August, the descriptive one.
The distinction worth holding is between the fires and the weather.
The fires are being fought and, in places, won. The heat wave is not something that can be fought. It arrives - on ground that has already burned 310 square miles, and on firefighters who have been at it for weeks.
Eric Brocardi of France's firefighters federation put it as 'we are at a point of fragility' [2].
