BORDEAUX, France (AFP) — French authorities said Sunday that more than 220,000 people have now been evacuated from the main forest fire raging in the southwest of the country that has also forced the closure of highways and rail lines.

More than 50,000 additional people have been ordered to leave villages around Bordeaux, which is now under threat from the flames, bringing the total evacuated from this single fire above 220,000. Tens of thousands more have been evacuated from other wildfires in France and central Spain.

Because of the spread of the flames in high winds, 60 kilometers of the main A63 highway from Bordeaux to the Spanish border has been closed because of the fires, regional authorities said. The SNCF rail company said it had also halted train traffic south of Bordeaux.

The fire "will take a long time to bring under control" and until it is contained "there will be no return" for evacuated residents and tourists, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said in an interview published Sunday by La Tribune.

The regional prefecture said that the fire has now burned some 42,000 hectares of land, making it one of the biggest in France since World War II. A 1949 fire devastated some 50,000 hectares.

The French army has sent 1,500 soldiers to help hundreds of exhausted firefighters who have been battling the flames for nearly a week.

Heat from the flames was causing whirlwinds that had made the wildfire "erratic and unmanageable," said firefighter captain Nicolas Braz, one of the leaders of the operation.

New blaze

Meanwhile, Spanish firefighters on Sunday battled a new front of fires near the coastal city of Valencia, where at least 15,000 people were evacuated.

Spain has already evacuated tens of thousands of people from villages west of the capital Madrid where extremely dry conditions have been worsened by heatwaves and strong winds.

In the Valencia region, on Spain's eastern coast, authorities said they were struggling to contain fires.

"The fire is beyond our capacity to extinguish; it has a perimeter of about 21 kilometers. It is still difficult to determine the number of hectares burned," Juanfran Perez Llorca, Valencia regional president told reporters late Saturday.

"We have evacuated around 15,000 people."

Spanish authorities also ordered new evacuations Saturday around Toledo, southwest of Madrid, describing the situation as complex with wind gusts pushing the blaze southward.

Around 60,000 have already been evacuated from around Madrid, where Portugese, Italian and other firefighting planes are helping Spanish teams on the ground.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said firefighters were working to save lives. One person has been reported killed by a seperate fire in the east of Spain.