PARIS (AFP) - More than 270,000 people have been forced to evacuate across France and Spain because of “apocalyptic” wildfires.
On Saturday, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, deployed 1,500 troops to tackle the worst fires the country had ever seen.
In the upmarket peninsula of Cap Ferret, in south-western France, tourists were forced to flee by boat to escape the flames.
Around 197,000 people were evacuated from Bordeaux as fires moved closer to the historic port city.
A state of emergency was declared in Spain as officials warned that the wildfire near Madrid was “beyond the capacity” of firefighters to contain.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Madrid’s regional president, described the blaze as “the worst fire in the history of the region”, with around 70,000 people evacuated or ordered to remain indoors.
With a blood orange sky and ash falling like snow, the French coastal town of Arès that Clare Hannan visits every summer soon came to resemble an eerie apocalyptic scene.
The British video editor had flown from London to Bordeaux blissfully unaware that fires had begun to sweep across the parched dry shrublands of the Cap Ferret peninsula. 
The next day she awoke to a glow in the sky as the fires were fanned by the winds coming in off the Atlantic. 
She was staying with an old friend and her family in Arès. But as the smell of the fire consumed the town everyone turned to local news and social media reports to establish where the flames would be fanned next.
“It was surreal,” she said. “It looked how I would imagine the apocalypse to be. The sky was orange and there were flakes of ash and the occasional bit of burnt bark falling.
“The sky was glowing. The light was like the twilight you get when there’s an eclipse.
“There was a constant smell of burnt pine in the air. It was quite overpowering and it restricted breathing a little - you could feel it in your chest.”
At 10am the next day, they learned that the Mayor of Arès, Xavier Daney, had ordered an immediate evacuation. A sudden wind change had led to the flames moving rapidly towards the outskirts of town.