France’s wildfire nightmare echoes California’s hard lessons on building in the woods
LE PORGE, France — A monster fire-induced thundercloud towered over Bordeaux this summer, the first time firefighters had ever seen this type of ominous smoke-and-lightning weather system in France.
The wildfire that produced it drove more than 200,000 people to evacuate in July and tore through 162 square miles of dense pine forest on the Atlantic coast.
It burned down 183 homes here in Le Porge, a tiny town in the middle of the forest where loggers live alongside neighbors who commute to Bordeaux.
One of the houses belonged to Jean-Charles Diné, who works on jet robotics near the Bordeaux Airport.
“Nothing left at all — everything burned,” he said outside the village church. Diné, 60, was already making plans to rebuild.
“There’s nothing unreasonable about building like this in the woods,” said Diné. “Not everyone wants to live in the city, so it’s completely fine to live in the forest.”
Not so fine any more, experts say, at least not without radical changes in the way France runs its forests and lets its suburbs expand deep into rural terrain.
1. Joelle Kerrier, 75, surveys her property that burned in Le Porge. 2. A hunting lodge stands beside pine forest burned by a wildfire that started July 22 and blackened about 104,000 acres in and around Le Porge. 3. The interior of D&P Green, a pine resin distillery destroyed by the wildfire in Le Porge.
Wildfires this summer in France, Greece and Spain, several of them deadly, have led to a painful reckoning as Europeans ponder a question all too familiar to Californians: Have they endangered their cities and suburbs by building too far into the wildlands?
Over the last decade, hundreds of homes have burned down near the outer limits of Lisbon, Milan and other European cities, including scores this summer outside Madrid and Athens.
In the Bordeaux region, where aerospace and technology jobs, splendid beaches and moderate housing prices have been attracting 20,000 new residents each year, suburban sprawl has pierced well into the pine forest, testing the limits of building in fire zones.
For France, long accustomed to wildfires along arid stretches of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the devastation in Le Porge has yielded rare consensus that its fire safety system is not up to fighting mega-fires brought on by climate change.
What to do about it is well understood. But at what cost to whom?
Political leaders are torn by competing pressures from the timber industry, firefighter unions, businesses and a public stunned by the scale of the threat.
In more fire-prone California, much of this drama played out decades ago. Yet France’s challenges ahead are in many ways the same as California’s — most basically, just how to survive a hotter, more volatile climate with fire dangers that far exceed what was normal just a generation ago.
The forest between Bordeaux and a line of majestic sand dunes on the Atlantic is the largest in France, far bigger than any in the Alps or Pyrenees. It is almost entirely artificial.
For centuries, it was a vast swamp where mosquitoes spread malaria among shepherds.
Then in 1857, the regime of Emperor Napoleon III ordered the planting of maritime pines to drain the bogs of southwestern France. The trees would absorb enormous volumes of water, thrive in the sandy soil and slow coastal erosion.
The pines would also enrich landowners and the Bordeaux bourgeoisie: The hardscrabble culture of sheep grazing gave way to a booming industry of wood, paper and resin.
The forest, the “Landes de Gascogne,” now employs more than 40,000 people, spinning off $10 billion a year, according to the government.
1. A burned intercom stands outside a house in Le Porge. 2. Emilie Lopes and her dog, Viktor, during an insurance adjuster’s visit to the ruins of her house in Le Porge. 3. Officials estimate that foresters must clear an estimated 4 million to 5 million tons of burned timber across the fire area near Bordeaux.
Over the last couple of decades, the forest’s surroundings have developed fast: 200,000 new homes have been built around Bordeaux. Jobs for engineers and technicians building rockets, airplanes and weapons have drawn families from afar. Affluent Parisians, two hours away by high-speed rail, have been buying vacation and retirement homes. In summer, the beaches are jammed.
Little by little, Bordeaux’s sprawl has reached into the rolling hills of some of France’s most celebrated vineyards — Médoc to the north, Entre-Deux-Mers to the east, Pessac-Léognan to the south.
But it’s to the city’s west, where suburbs fuse into the coastal pines, that fire hazards have soared.
For Bruno Lafon, the mayor of Biganos, a paper-mill town near Le Porge, the chronic fire disasters in California serve as a warning.
One of the walls in his town-hall office is covered by an aerial photo of the local pinelands. Squinting in front of it, he pointed first to the wide fire breaks that protect his town, then to a cluster of houses built right in the trees, just like the homes that burned in Le Porge.
“We call that California-style,” said Lafon, who once traveled around California on a motorcycle. “It’s not a good idea.”
France has actually been “pretty hardcore” about slowing development in wildlands, but not every region is doing it well, said Paavo Monkkonen, a UCLA urban planning and public policy professor who in 2025 completed a fellowship in Paris.
“It’s very depressing,” he said. “You go to these beautiful old cities — then you go outside in the suburbs, and it’s like, ‘Oh no, this just looks like a cuter version of Californian suburbs.’”
The great fire of August 1949, the biggest ever recorded in France, tore through much of the same terrain that burned this summer. It wiped out 200 square miles of trees and killed 82 people, mainly firefighters trapped between the fire and a backfire.
Black-and-white news footage shows volunteer firefighters swatting flames with tree branches and dousing flare-ups with flower-pot watering cans.
In the political uproar that followed, France set up a system to prevent and fight fires in its biggest forest. It is still in place today, funded by a tax on pine grove owners. They run it in collaboration with public fire agencies.
They maintain lookout towers, water stations and strategic corridors of cleared land among the pines, typically 55 yards wide.
But in this summer of extreme heat and drought, Lafon, also a pine grower who oversees the fire safety system, came to recognize it has reached its breaking point.
An aerial view near Le Porge, where 183 houses were lost in the wildfire.
“We won’t be able to live in this forest the way we used to, because there are more people, there are more risks, and the climate has changed,” he said.
Global warming has hit Europe more severely than any other continent: Its average temperatures are now 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate data agency. Worldwide, the average warming is 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
In France, June and July were the hottest months ever recorded by the nation’s weather service. Wildfires have never burned as much French terrain in a year, none bigger than the one that incinerated much of Le Porge.
It was noon on July 22 when sparks from a mulcher are believed to have set the woods on fire.
During the first hour, pine grove owners urged fire commanders to light a backfire a few hundred yards from Le Porge. They were furious that it wasn’t done until 12 hours later.
“The fire would have been put out very quickly,” said Didier Deyres, who lost two-thirds of his pine grove.
Like many in town, Deyres suspects regional fire commanders sacrificed Le Porge to save houses of the wealthy nearby on the Cap Ferret sandbar peninsula: “I’m not afraid to say it: We were abandoned.”
Martial Zaninetti, the mayor of Le Porge, said the accusation was understandable, but “not necessarily real.” Fire commanders deny it.
The village church, town hall, supermarket and school were saved, along with homes close by. But full blocks of houses along roads leading into the forest burned to the ground. Zaninetti was one of the lucky ones.
“I was a firefighter for a full day,” he said days later. “We saved three houses — with garden hoses.”
Marie and Samuel Raturat Bouny, a couple who run a surf shop near the beach, lived for six years in their house in Le Porge. They were on holiday in the Pyrenees when they learned their house was gone.
“I kept the things that really meant something to me in a box — some poems from my grandmother, letters that my great-grandfather wrote during the war,” Marie said as the couple’s kids, Lilou, 10, and Noa, 6, climbed around the blackened lot. “I wasn’t able to get them. Nothing will ever bring them back.”
An appliance that melted rests on a counter in D&P Green, a pine resin distillery destroyed by the wildfire Le Porge.
Adrien Michelet, 40, a mechanic, stands at the site of his workshop in Le Porg. He said he recovered nothing from the ruins.
A few days after returning to what was left of Le Porge, about 100 residents gathered in the shade of a big tree in the village square to show gratitude to 20 firefighters from French Polynesia who had flown to Bordeaux to help put out the fire. The mayor gave each of them a pine sapling.
The crowd listened in silence as the Polynesians, wearing blue fire uniforms, sang a Tahitian hymn in harmony while two of them strummed ukuleles. The church bell rang midway through the tune. When it was over, the townspeople applauded for a full two minutes.
Ten days later, villagers filled the square again. This time, they loudly booed the French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who was meeting privately with the mayor of Le Porge.
In this era of tight French budgets, the clamor in much of the country now is for spending to expand the ranks of firefighters and buy more equipment — aircraft, trucks, whatever it takes.
Éric Brocardi, spokesman for the national federation of firefighters, reminded TF1 television viewers that France had to call on Australia to send Chinook and Bell helicopters, “because over there, they’re used to megafires.”
“Our challenges have changed in scale,” he said. “Climate disruption has to make us change scale, too, when it comes to equipment and resources.”
California has spent billions acquiring advanced firefighting technology and recruiting professional firefighters. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the state fire department, runs the world’s largest civilian firefighting air force.
That didn’t stop catastrophes like the 2018 fire in the Sierra foothills that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85. Nor the 2025 fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades that left 31 dead and burned down more than 16,000 homes and other buildings.
For all of California’s strides to protect people in fire zones, it has largely avoided confronting a deeper question: Should people be free to build there in the first place?
For the most part, California has declined to usurp local governments’ power to decide what is built where, which has yielded relentless development of wildlands. At the same time, it has tried to encourage home building in urban centers; projects that would add to suburban sprawl require stricter environmental reviews.
In France, a 2021 climate resilience law was aimed at slowing down development of forests and open rural land. Lawmakers watered it down in 2023, but France has nonetheless made progress.
1. Marie Raturat Bouny, 34, and her daughter Noa, 6, take in the ruins of their house in Le Porge. “We had wanted to live facing nature for a long time,” said her husband, Samuel. 2. The interior of the D&P Green pine resin distillery, one of many businesses the relied on the forest. 3. An unburned pine cone lies on the floor of the blackened forest.
Around Paris, Toulouse and Marseilles, local policies that deter suburban sprawl and promote new housing in city centers have slowed expansion of outer suburbs, a recent study found.
The Bordeaux region has slowed rural building too, but fire danger from the pines remains extremely high, said Claire Aragau, the professor at the Paris School of Urban Planning who led the study. During the wet spring, she said, undergrowth flourished, leaving an enormous layer of tinder once heat waves took hold in June.
“The summer turned it all into straw — into torches,” she said.
To avert future calamities, the forest outside Bordeaux must be thinned and its fire breaks widened, said Arthur Guérin-Turcq, a Sorbonne University geographer whose family cultivates pines near Le Porge.
Moist vegetation needs to be planted among the pines, he said, and bigger fire buffer zones are needed on each town’s outer edges, such as ball fields or livestock pastures.
But those measures require tree owners to shrink the size of their groves and give up income, hence some skepticism among experts about the promise of President Emmanuel Macron to “replant and rebuild a different forest.”
“Only a state that takes an active role in managing land can do that, because the forest’s own representatives won’t do it on their own,” Guérin-Turcq said. “They’ll do the bare minimum.”
As for basic fire prevention, France lags California by some measures. Brush clearance is required nationwide, but local fire departments rarely pester property owners.
“Brush clearance rules have been in place since the 1950s, but have been enforced very, very little,” said Christine Bouisset, a University of Pau professor who has studied fire risks along suburban-rural boundaries.
Emilie Lopes sorts donated food at the relief center set up in the cultural center hall in Le Porge.
(Wayan Barre / For The Times)
Elsewhere in Europe, it’s worse. Greece, for instance, has “genuinely anarchic development in some areas with a lot of illegal construction,” Bouisset said.
For Zaninetti, the mayor of Le Porge, it’s inevitable that taking the steps needed to protect the public from megafires will be a political nightmare. But it must be done, he said, because Europe’s climate has already changed.
“It’s not at our door,” he said. “It’s come through the door.”
Special correspondent Finnegan reported from Le Porge and staff writer Haggerty from Los Angeles. Photographer Wayan Barre contributed to this report from Le Porge.
