France's interior ministry says 474 people, including 183 minors, have been detained over wildfires since the start of summer. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

About 70% of those arrested were suspected of deliberately starting fires and the rest of doing so accidentally, it said. French media said a 15-year-old boy had been detained in connection with a fire near Bordeaux airport that killed two firefighters in July.

French authorities on Friday evacuated more than 525 people from the village of Luglon in the south-west region of Landes after a new wildfire tore through almost 1,100 hectares (2,700 acres) of tinder-dry pine forest in less than 24 hours.

“The situation is unfavourable and the fire remains raging,” Gilles Clavreul, a regional official, told reporters, adding that 500 firefighters were tackling the flames and six water-dumping aircraft had been sent to assist. Roads to the village were closed.

Luglon is about 62 miles (100km) south-east of the popular holiday destinations of Arcachon Bay and the Lège-Cap-Ferret peninsula where two huge wildfires destroyed more than 50,000 hectares in late July, forcing the evacuation of as many as 220,000 people.

Scientists say climate breakdown is causing more frequent and more extreme weather events, evaporating soils and waterways, fuelling wildfires and leading to thousands of excess deaths in France. Europe is heating at about twice the global average rate.

In western Germany, more than 2,000 people fled their homes early on Friday morning to take shelter in a nearby primary school after a wildfire in the nearby Hürtgen forest spread to within a few hundred metres of the village of Gey.

“This forest fire threatens to hit the local community hard,” Mona Neubaur, the deputy premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, posted on social media. Unexploded second world war ordnance was also hampering firefighting efforts.

The news agency dpa reported explosions could be heard as munitions detonated in the flames, forcing firefighters to stay out of the area, not far from the Belgian border, for safety. German army tanks and helicopters were providing support.

In Croatia, a wildfire driven by strong winds descended on the tourist town of Lokva Rogoznica on the Dalmatian coast overnight, engulfing houses, forcing about 1,000 people to evacuate and injuring several dozen, fire brigade and health officials said.

Of 36 people treated by ambulance services in the city of Split, about 15.5 miles to the north, 14 were admitted to hospital and seven had life-threatening injuries, local health officials said. Emergency shelters opened in several nearby towns.

“It was a strong fire, it swept everything on its way ... there has been huge material damage,” Slavko Tucaković, the regional chief fire commander, said on Friday, adding that the blaze appeared to have calmed by Friday morning.

The country’s prime minister, Andrej Plenković, said on a visit nearby Omiš, where the evacuees were sheltering in a sports hall, that the blaze was “one of the worst fires in recent years” but “the most important” there were no confirmed fatalities so far.

A stretch of a major coastal highway was shut. “Everything flared up in a second,” Goran Lović, the owner of a cafe near where the fire broke out, told the Jutarnji List newspaper. “It just happened all of a sudden, there was an open flame.”

In north-east Spain, an army unit removed the remains of three 11th-century Aragonese kings from the San Juan de la Peña monastery after it was threatened by a wildfire and took them to a museum in nearby Huesca. The fire, which began on Monday, intensified on Thursday, authorities said, driven by higher temperatures and strong winds that have enabled it burn through more than 9,000 hectares, forcing the evacuation of 16 towns and villages.

A much larger wildfire in southern Spain also worsened on Thursday. It has so far burned 31,000 hectares in the province of Huelva and forced the evacuation of about 700 people.

In northern Greece, a fleet of small boats evacuated about 500 holidaymakers from beaches on Thursday as a forest fire threatened the resort.