France's largest wildfire since 1949 is extinguished

French authorities have declared the Saumos wildfire extinguished, two months after the blaze broke out in southwest France and became the country's largest recorded wildfire since 1949.

State services said on September 28 that the fire burned 42,000 hectares this summer, including 37,296 hectares destroyed, and that no deaths had been reported.

The fire erupted in July near Saumos in the Gironde region. It forced the evacuation of around 224,000 people as it threatened the Cap-Ferret tourist peninsula and the outskirts of Bordeaux.

Authorities had brought the blaze under control on August 1, but it continued to smoulder underground for weeks before being declared out.

More than 3,300 firefighters took part in the operation. Officials described it as the largest firefighting effort in modern French civil security history.

The blaze was the largest recorded in France since a 1949 wildfire in the same region that burned about 50,000 hectares. Provisional figures say around 98,000 hectares have been destroyed by wildfires in France this year, the highest level since 1976.