Wildfires raged across southern Europe on July 6, forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes.
Hundreds of firefighters are battling blazes that have devastated more than 19,000 hectares of land, an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, across Portugal, Spain, France and Greece.
And temperatures are on the rise again, predicted to reach 40 degrees Celsius in parts of a region still suffering the aftermath of a recent record-breaking heatwave.
In southwestern France near the city of Perpignan, 700 hundred firefighters backed by special aircraft battled to control a "gigantic" blaze spreading in a hard-to-reach remote area, with more than 10,000 local residents evacuated.
The blazes come shortly after a heatwave in June, one of Europe's worst, during which thousands of excess deaths were registered.
With the mercury set to rise again in the coming days, authorities expressed alarm that the annual summer wild fire season had started a month early.
In Greece, flames set off by a forest fire tore through two factories in Thessaloniki over the weekend, forcing authorities to evacuate the surrounding area.
In Spain, a fire near the northeastern Costa Brava coast burned more than 2,200 hectares in two days and firefighters said their efforts would be "complicated" by rising temperatures and the many "smoking hotspots" within the fire's perimeter.
In Portugal, emergency services said they had controlled "80 percent" of a wildfire that has devastated some 13,000 hectares of forest and scrub land in the north of the country.
Elsewhere, major fires also destroyed hundreds of hectares of forest, vineyards and scrub land on the Croatian island of Hvar and at Tale in Albania, authorities said.
