LONDON — Weather maps for Europe turned blood red on Sunday as the heat that has seared Spain and Italy and the fires in southwestern France made their way north toward Britain.
London was hot in the high 80s, but temperatures on Monday and Tuesday were expected to reach 100 or higher, breaking records in a place where air conditioning is rare and buildings are built to trap heat.
In France, the extreme temperatures that have fueled the wildfires in the south are expected to spill over northwards, especially along the coast Atlantic coast, bracing for unusually scorching weather.
In Italy, where temperatures were expected to reach the 90s on Sunday, the heat was bad enough, but the country is also experiencing its worst drought in years. The government has allocated 36.5 million euros, about $36.8 million, to farmers suffering from hunger in the northern regions. Two hydroelectric plants in the area had to be closed because there was not enough water to cool them.
And in Spain, a heat wave entered its eighth day, with 30 wildfires spreading across the country. Relief is hard to find, even after the sun goes down — Saturday night was Madrid’s fifth consecutive “scorching night,” a term used when temperatures don’t drop below 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The previous record was set at three nights. Rubén del Campo, the spokesman for the State Meteorological Agency, said that of the 27 scorching nights recorded in the past century, more than half, 15 since 2012.
As everywhere on earth, Europe is seeing more and more extreme weather events, partly as a result of climate change. For proof, one need only look back to last summer, when floods swept through Germany and other countries in July, killing hundreds of people. In August, several forest fires devastated large parts of Greece. And, also in August, a city in Sicily may have recorded the highest temperature ever in Europe: 124 degrees Fahrenheit.
But on Sunday, attention in France was focused on the wildfires, in the southwestern Gironde region near Bordeaux, where more than 1,200 firefighters were still struggling to contain two separate fires.
The fires have destroyed more than 25,000 hectares of vegetation and have forced more than 14,000 people to evacuate since Tuesday, local authorities said.
Four firefighters have suffered minor injuries so far, they said, and damage to buildings and homes is minimal. Still, authorities warned the situation was unstable, with higher temperatures and fluctuating winds for Monday.
“Weather conditions are very, very bad,” Vincent Ferrier, a local official in Langon, an area of Gironde, told reporters on Sunday. “These are, of course, the worst conditions you can have when fighting a fire.”
In Rome, where it was in the 1990s for the past week, street vendors dozed in the shade on Sunday mornings as tourists filled their water bottles at the famous fountains.
“It’s hot — too hot to walk around during the day,” said Serena Vendoni, 57, a hairdresser from northern Italy who went to Rome for a long weekend with her family. “But even at home it is warm. We have been using the air conditioning every day and every night for almost two months now.”
She said her family’s electricity bills had skyrocketed as the temperature had rarely dropped below 86 for weeks.
“We want to be careful with the AC,” said Ms. Vendoni. Partly due to the war in Ukraine, energy prices in Europe have skyrocketed. “But we need to be able to live in the house – and sleep.”
On Sunday, people in Britain made their own plans to withstand the coming heat. The forecasts for Monday and Tuesday were bad – On Friday, the country’s national weather service issued the strongest warning it has for London and much of England.
The warning, a “red” warning, is intended to convey a risk to life, and health officials stressed that even healthy people can be adversely affected. The public was warned to try stay out of the sun from 11 am to 3 pm, to make essential journeys only on those days, not to exercise in the hottest part of the day and to take water with you.
Reporting contributed by: Aurelien Breeden from Paris, Francheska Melendez from Foz do Farelo, Portugal, Gaia Pianigianic from Rome and Euan Ward from London.