Las Médulas (AFP) — A young boy died of heatstroke in Italy while wildfires threatened a UNESCO site in Spain and French cities saw record temperatures, as a heatwave baked Europe on Monday.
Many towns and cities in France, Italy and the Balkans were put on red alert due to the heat.
Wildfires fanned by strong winds forced the evacuations of thousands of people throughout the continent and threatened popular tourist sites in Turkey and Spain.
The four-year-old Romanian boy who died in Italy succumbed days after being found unconscious in his family’s car on the island of Sardinia.
The news came as Italy’s health ministry issued a red alert warning for seven major cities, including Bologna and Florence.
Some 11 Italian cities are on red alert for Tuesday, and 16 cities on Wednesday. Red alerts were also announced in southern France and on the Adriatic and Ionian coasts in the Balkans.
“The heatwave currently affecting France, Spain, and the Balkan countries is not surprising. It is driven by a persistent heat dome over Europe,” Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the meteorology department in Britain’s University of Reading, told AFP.
“Heatwaves don’t roar like storms — they creep in quietly, but can be just as deadly.”
A blaze, which broke out on Sunday, damaged a UNESCO World Heritage-listed Roman-era mining site at Les Medulas in northwestern Spain — famed for its striking red landscape — and prompted hundreds of residents to evacuate.
High temperatures and winds of up to 40 kilometers per hour created “many difficulties” for firefighters struggling to contain the wildfire, said Juan Carlos Suarez-Quinones, the Castile and Leon regional environment minister.
“We will not allow people to return until safety in their communities is absolutely guaranteed,” he told reporters, estimating that about 700 people had been displaced.
Spain has been in the grip of a heatwave for the past week, with temperatures nearing 40C in many areas and fueling wildfires.
In the southern tourist town of Tarifa, more than 2,000 people were evacuated, some from hotels and beaches, after a fire that had been subdued on Friday flared up again, with more than 100 firefighters battling the flames.
In neighboring Portugal, firefighters were battling three large wildfires in the center and north of the country, while Morocco is sending two aircra ft to help fight the fires after two Portuguese planes broke down.
In Italy, around 190 firefighters and the army were tackling a wildfire on Mount Vesuvius that caused the closure of the national park to tourists.