Wildfires in France and Spain are forcing 267,000 people to flee as crews continue to battle the flames.

More than 267,000 people were forced to flee parts of Western Europe on Saturday uncontrollable wildfires fury continued in Spain and France.

Thick floors of black ash covered rooftops north of central Madrid, the Spanish capital, where 70,000 people were evacuated as residents were forced to close their windows due to the stench of smoke.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, visiting a fire station near Madrid, said the priority was to “save lives” while warning that a “complex” battle lay ahead. His government has declared a state of emergency across the country.

Fires they have burned 130,000 hectares of forest already this year in Spain, up from an annual average of 100,000 hectares over the past decade, Sanchez said. He said the good weather on Saturday gave firefighters an “opportunity” to bring the fire under control.

“We will have difficult hours ahead because even though the temperatures have dropped, we don’t know exactly how the wind will increase, how strong it will be,” he said.

Jacqueline Villafranca, a 38-year-old Peruvian native who fled to Madrid on Friday with her husband and their two daughters, said as smoke filled her village of Navalagamella, “I thought everything was going to burn, the house and everything.”

“Here you can breathe normally – yesterday was unbearable,” he said, sitting in the gymnasium that has become a shelter.

Among those fleeing the suburbs was audiovisual technician Luis, who had spent the afternoon assisting evacuees in the village of Pelayos de la Presa when he received the order to evacuate.

“At first I cried because that’s where I grew up. But now, it’s a feeling of anger and resignation, because there’s nothing we can do as long as we’re not allowed to go back and see what we’ll find there,” he told AFPTV.

The fires in Spain and France have progressed rapidly due to tinderbox conditions which have been worsened by the consecutive heatwaves the two countries have experienced since May.

Scientists say global warming is increasing droughts and causing extreme weather events to become more dangerous and more frequent. Europe is the hottest continent due to climate change.

In France, about 242,000 hectares were destroyed by wildfires – which French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said was a “historical record” about 10 times the size of Paris. At least 197,000 people have been evacuated from France because of the wildfires, “potentially” the largest peacetime evacuation in the country, Nunez said on Saturday.

The total area burned so far this year in EU countries is the second largest on record, according to satellite data from the European Forest Fire Information System.

Large fires in both countries have been burning for two or three days, killing hundreds of firefighters fighting them day and night.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described the fire as unprecedented and said that the Gironde fire has become so strong that it is creating its own winds.

“Our priority is clear: protecting people’s lives,” he wrote on social media, adding that evacuation orders “must be respected without delay.”

“We will not put ourselves at risk when it comes to the safety of the French people,” he added.

French President Emmanuel Macron has deployed 1,000 troops to help firefighters near Bordeaux, and on Saturday his government ordered an A400M military transport plane to join smaller planes already battling the flames.

The modified A400M, which can release 20 tons of fire suppressants, is a test that has just completed preparation and testing.

The head of the fire department in Paris on Saturday told AFP that about 100 firefighters from the French capital have been sent to help in the southwest, adding that 45 firefighters and six vehicles have been sent there.

Spain and France have also requested, and received, the assistance of aircraft sent from other European countries.

Italy said two of its Canadair firefighting planes had been sent to Spain. Spain’s Civil Protection Service said it expects the arrival on Saturday of two more from Greece, to join flights from the Netherlands and Portugal that have already been sent to Spain.

France is expecting two water bombers from Croatia and two more aircraft from Portugal and two Black Hawk heavy-lift helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

“It’s impressive and scary,” Laurent Moretti, a resident of the French town of Arès, told the Associated Press. “There has never been an evacuation at this level before. What we really hope is that the firefighters will quickly control it.”

Dozens of French firefighters were injured, authorities said, but no deaths were reported in either country.

Emergency shelters were set up at schools and gyms in south-west France as tourists and residents were left wondering where to return.

“We didn’t have anyone to lift us up,” said Caroline Larrode, 49, who had fled her home in Saumos to live in a large Bordeaux area housing evacuees from the Arcachon Basin with her three cats.

Nuala Kelly, a 75-year-old Irish tourist, said she had never seen anything like it.

“I’ve never, never, never, never, never, and I’ve traveled all over the world and been in all kinds of situations,” he told AFP at the main exhibition center in Bordeaux that now holds thousands of people.

At least 5,700 more people died than usual in France last month amid a historic heat wave, French health officials said earlier this week. That number represents the largest increase in the average death toll nationwide since June and early July temperatures.

In Italy, thousands of emergency workers battled dozens of blazes in Sicily and the Calabria region, where a local official said arsonists started the blaze by tying rags soaked in flammable liquid to the tails of stray cats to fan the flames.