President Emmanuel Macron has urged firefighters battling a huge blaze in southwest France to keep up their strength for some gruelling weeks ahead.
"The coming weeks will be tough and we have to hold out," he said as he visited a crisis centre in the nearby winemaking capital of Bordeaux.
A huge forest fire between the city and the sea has since Wednesday ravaged 42,000 hectares of forest - an area larger than the US city of Detroit - and destroyed the homes of some 240 families.
Tourists and residents have had to flee at the height of the summer holidays.
France has been struck by three heatwaves since May as part of increasingly common extreme weather episodes linked to climate change, causing thousands of excess deaths and fuelling wildfires.
Mr Macron pledged the government's support in the national response to one of the largest fires in France since World War II.
"We will be there, and together we are going to win this battle, and we will also be there over the long term," he said.
He added that when the blaze is extinguished "we'll have to replant and rebuild a different forest because this forest is not the same".
This was due to the "conditions of climate change in which we will live", he said.
Lieutenant Colonel David Annotel, from the National Federation of Firefighters of France, told the RTL broadcaster earlier in the day that it would take "many weeks, probably several months" before authorities could declare the fire completely extinguished.
In Paris, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told reporters that "the fire is not contained, which means it's still burning".
"We really need to remain extremely cautious," he added.
The European Union is ramping up the number of firefighting planes and helicopters sent to help tackle the blaze, the bloc's crisis management chief said.
"We currently have nine aerial assets deployed on site and tomorrow we will have 11, drawn from our European strategic reserve," EU commissioner Hadja Lahbib said.
Ms Lahbib said the assets deployed from a central fleet under the EU's command include water-bombing aircraft and Black Hawk helicopters.
She said that so far six aircraft have been deployed from the EU's fleet to Spain.
Ms Lahbib said the simultaneous challenges had strained the EU's capacities, which pool assets from across the bloc.
"Extreme conditions are looming for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, in addition to France, the Iberian Peninsula, and North Africa - where the situation is expected to worsen, including in Portugal starting today," Ms Lahbib said.
She said that in 2025 there had been a total of 19 requests to activate the EU's emergency mechanism to help with the wildfires.
"This year, I think we're obviously going to top that number," she said.
Drizzle overnight offered a little respite to firefighters in France, but efforts continue as farmers and firefighters work to stamp out as much of the blaze as possible before a new spike in temperatures tomorrow.
Tractors fitted with blades to clear land, pickups towing water tanks and logging trucks sped along a road to join a convoy of fire engines southwest of Bordeaux.
Farmer and wood transporter Christopher Bonnefond, 25, said he and three colleagues had left their homes in another part of France before dawn to provide support.
"We want to help," he said in the village of Marcheprime, adding: "I'm a hunter and I want nature to stay like it is."
At a water point near the forest fire, he stood on top of a giant plastic cistern usually used for manure, watching a pipe fill it with water.
"It's a huge time-saver" for the firefighters, he said.
Further north in the forest, the road was lined with smouldering pine trees and blackened trunks, as firefighting planes flew overhead.
A specially modified A400M military transport plane dumped tonnes of fire retardant over the fire, the army said.
Three burnt-out car husks and a destroyed trailer lay in a garden near the village of Le Temple, with smoke rising from the charred forest nearby.
'There's ash everywhere,' says Irish woman in Bordeaux
Finance minister Roland Lescure said insurance companies had pledged to pay the housing costs for those displaced, "whether or not their home has been damaged".
France's fire has caused a "pyrocumulonimbus" - a giant fire cloud that can create its own winds and packs lightning and sometimes tornadoes that can cause more blazes, according to France's national firefighters federation, who said the phenomenon had never before been seen in the country.
Watch: France braces for fresh heatwave as fires continue
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The weather office has forecast more hot weather in France from tomorrow, with temperatures that could soar to 40C and dry wind.
"All the conditions are in place for the fire to start up again," Philippe de Gonneville, the mayor of the village of Lege-Cap-Ferret, told AFP.
Fires have roared through 115,000 hectares in France since the start of the year, the authorities have said.
Roaring flames in the UNESCO-listed Fontainebleau forest outside Paris earlier this month devastated 2,000 hectares.
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