Fire-Season Survival Knowledge

Sourcing water on the road

Your most reliable source is the service point at an aire, dispensing fresh water free or for a couple of euros by coin or card. Full detail on bornes, brands and payment quirks is in Practical extras. The Camping-Car Park network guarantees water and electricity at every site, and Park4Night and Campercontact will show you the nearest working borne wherever you are. Supermarkets are your backstop: Intermarché, Super U, E.Leclerc, Carrefour and Lidl all sell 5-litre and 8-litre bottles for pennies per litre, and in a heatwave we'd carry a bottled reserve regardless of what's in the tank.

Then there are cemetery taps. Nearly every French cemetery has one, installed for watering flowers, and van travellers have quietly used them for decades. Know the arguments before you do: the water is paid for by the commune and intended for mourners, and locals in touristy areas have started to resent tank-fillers. Many taps are also marked eau non potable. Treat that sign as absolute: never drink the water, treated or not, and never put it in the drinking-water tank. At most, use it for washing. Our position: a discreet few litres for washing in an emergency is one thing; a full 100-litre tank fill with a hose is another. Don't do the second. Village fountains signed eau potable are fine; unsigned springs should be filtered or skipped.

Keeping food and water reserves in the heat

A closed van in the southern sun can pass 50°C inside. In fire season that heat is also a planning problem: if a road closure or evacuation strands you, you want two days of water on board. Budget around four litres per person per day for drinking alone, more for cooking and washing, and don't overnight anywhere remote with the tank below a third.

Keep drinking water in the darkest, lowest cupboards, never in sun through a window. Tank water goes warm and stale fast in summer: rotate it and keep bottled water for drinking.
Absorption (3-way) fridges struggle once ambient temperatures pass the low 30s; compressor fridges cope better but still benefit from airflow. Park so the fridge vents are on the shaded side, and don't overfill the fridge with warm shopping in the afternoon.
Carry a heat-proof food reserve that doesn't need the fridge at all: tins, dried pasta, UHT milk, hard cheese, cured sausage. It's also your evacuation ration.
Tyres carry the same heat load. Set pressures cold, matched to the loaded weight on the vehicle plate, and never let air out of hot tyres: the pressure rise is normal. Check the date codes before a southern trip (tyres over about six years old are blowout-prone in 40°C heat) and carry a pressure gauge.

Heat and the human body

Heatwaves kill more travellers in France than wildfires do. Météo-France runs a canicule warning system: check its vigilance map daily in summer and treat an orange or red heat alert as seriously as a fire alert. Never sleep in a fully sealed van in a heatwave. Keep air moving, park in shade, and use altitude as your bolt-hole: the high country stays liveable when the lowlands bake.

Learn the two stages of heat illness. Heat exhaustion shows as heavy sweating, dizziness, headache, nausea and cramps: get into shade, cool the skin with water, drink, and rest. Heatstroke shows as hot dry skin, confusion or collapse: that is a 15 or 112 emergency, not a lie-down-and-wait condition.

Which French landscapes burn

France's fire-prone terrain is distinctive once you learn to see it. Garrigue is the low, aromatic limestone scrub of Languedoc and Provence (thyme, kermes oak, juniper), full of resinous oils and bone-dry by July. Maquis is its taller, denser cousin on acid soils, covering much of Corsica and the Maures and Estérel hills; it burns hot and fast. The Landes de Gascogne, south of Bordeaux, is the largest planted forest in western Europe: millions of maritime pines in rows. In the summer of 2022 the La Teste-de-Buch and Landiras fires burned close to 30,000 hectares of it and forced tens of thousands of evacuations. July 2026 was worse: a single Gironde fire passed 42,000 hectares during a wider week of severe fires in France, and more than 220,000 people were moved out of its path, including the complete evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula. It was described as one of Europe's largest evacuations since the Second World War and as France's largest peacetime evacuation. The fire grew powerful enough to build its own storm clouds (pyrocumulonimbus), reported as a first for France, and the EU's Civil Protection Mechanism was activated to bring in firefighting aircraft. A separate fire at Biscarrosse in the Landes burned more than 3,500 hectares and forced over 20,000 more people out. Anywhere with Aleppo pine over dry Mediterranean scrub is the classic high-risk combination.

At the other end of the scale, some landscapes have historically very low wildfire activity: because of what they're made of, not because of luck. Brittany and Normandy's wet oceanic pasture and bocage stay green and are broken up by hedges and damp ditches. High-altitude ground above the treeline in the Alps and Pyrenees has little continuous fuel. Wet meadow country like the Jura plateaux rarely carries fire. Note we say historically low, not fireproof: in the drought of 2022 even Brittany's Monts d'Arrée moorland burned around 1,700 hectares, because dried heather behaves like fuel anywhere. July 2026 added a starker example: two fires burned around 2,050 hectares of the Fontainebleau forest south of Paris, closing the A6 for a time, evacuating around 1,000 people including a campsite, and shutting roughly half the forest to visitors. Drought plus ignition can burn any dried fuel, north or south. Low-risk regions make relaxed touring; they don't cancel the basics.

Choosing an overnight spot in the south

In the south in summer, pick your spot the way a firefighter would. The rule is fuel, not height: the safe overnight spot is large open ground with nothing flammable around it, wherever it sits. Valley bottoms are one bad option: smoke pools there overnight, gorges funnel flame and wind like a chimney, and there is usually one narrow road in and out. Slopes and ridges above vegetated ground are the other: fire accelerates uphill and pre-heats the fuel above it, so height only helps when the slope below you has nothing to burn. Open ground gives you the rest: you can see smoke coming, feel the wind that's driving it, and keep your options.

Good neighbours: vineyards, orchards, ploughed fields, wide river shingle, big tarmac or gravel car parks, the beach side of a coast road.
Bad neighbours: pine branches over your roof, dry scrub touching your bumper, a single-track dead-end lane through forest.
Check conditions before you commit, in this order: official instructions first (FR-Alert, gendarmerie, mairie), then the prefecture's daily massif-access map and Météo-France vigilance, then our companion site europefiremap.com for the daily planning overview. Many Mediterranean départements close forest massifs entirely on high-risk days (Bouches-du-Rhône publishes a daily access map), and parking overnight in a closed massif can mean a fine as well as real danger. Once you can see or smell smoke, no website substitutes for leaving.

Escape-route thinking

Make this a habit, not a drama. Every overnight stop in fire country, ask: if I had to leave in five minutes, in the dark, which way would I go, and is there a second way if that one is blocked? Park nose-out. Keep the keys in the same place every night, fuel above half, and on genuinely high-risk days sleep ready to roll: awning in, chairs stowed, nothing plugged in that takes ten minutes to unhook.

Know FR-Alert before you hear it. France's official emergency broadcast pushes evacuation orders to every phone in the affected zone, roaming UK phones included: a loud siren tone that overrides silent mode, then on-screen instructions in French with routes and assembly points. It cannot reach a phone in aeroplane mode, so leave yours on a network overnight in fire country. Follow its instructions over any app or website, including ours.

Report smoke when you see it: early reports are a public service, not a bother. Dial 18 for the sapeurs-pompiers (fire brigade) or 112, and give your location slowly and simply: commune name, road number, GPS coordinates from your phone. "Feu de forêt" plus the place name will be understood. 112 works from any phone in France and operators can usually reach an English speaker, though not always instantly.

If you wake to smoke, leave early: a van is slow, and roads out of fire zones jam quickly. Drive across the wind rather than downwind of the smoke, towards open farmland, towns, the coast or ground that has already burned, and never up a narrow wooded valley. Never drive into thick smoke you cannot see through: turn around. Being over-cautious costs you one relocated night's sleep; the alternative can cost a great deal more.

If fire reaches you and you cannot drive out, do not run, and do not try to outrun flames uphill. A vehicle shields you from radiant heat far longer than open ground:

Stop on the largest patch of ground with nothing to burn: tarmac, a ploughed field, ground already burned. Get behind a solid barrier if one exists.
Stay in the van, below window level, with windows and vents shut, engine running, headlights and hazards on.
Cover exposed skin with dry cotton or wool, and call 112.
Leave the vehicle only after the fire front has passed, and move onto ground that has already burned.

The numbers, memorised or on the dashboard: 112 (all emergencies, any phone), 15 (SAMU, medical), 17 (police), 18 (fire brigade), 114 (by SMS, for deaf and hard-of-hearing users or when you cannot speak).

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