Simon Markey was playing golf in Stourbridge, in central England, when he saw a fire start in a field nearby and spread quickly across the golf course despite efforts by firefighters to contain it.
It reached an area of houses, said local resident Paul Nash, whose neighbour’s house burned down.
“I heard a scream, and all the trees along the railway track were exploding. They weren’t just setting fire, they were exploding. So we just grabbed everything and left,” Nash said.
In France, authorities evacuated 525 people from the village of Luglon after a wildfire broke out in the southwestern Landes region, not far from an area already devastated by major blazes this summer.
Rescue services in Spain late on Thursday launched an operation to remove the remains of three kings who ruled the Aragón region in the 11th century from a monastery threatened by a wildfire.
An even larger fire in Huelva, in southern Spain, has burned 31,000 hectares so far and forced the evacuation of 700 people.
Firefighting planes in Spain have clocked more than 8,200 hours flying time so far this year, exceeding the number of hours flown in 2025, when a record 393,000 hectares of land burned, Spain’s Environment Minister Sara Aagesen said on Bluesky.