The mayor of Bordeaux in southwest France said on Sunday authorities had no current plans to evacuate the UNESCO-listed city due to raging forest fires but were "ready for anything."
Firefighters have been battling to hold the blazes back from Bordeaux, which lies at the heart of the world-famous wine-growing region, with authorities evacuating thousands of people from villages close to the city.
"We're very vigilant," Bordeaux mayor Thomas Cazenave said, adding that there were no current plans to move the city's 270,000 residents.
"The fire is further south," he told reporters at a shelter for people displaced by the wildfires.
"It is still on the edge of the metropolitan area, but it is not advancing on the western side of the metropolis," he said.
He estimated that the flames raged between 25 and 30 kilometres from the city itself and around 15 kilometres from the metropolitan area near the town of Martignas-sur-Jalle.
The town of 8,000 people, located on the far western edge of the metropolitan area, has been evacuated.
The unpredictability of the fire is complicating the work of emergency responders.
"This is a fire that makes no sense. It has no direction," Guillaume Millet of the Gironde fire and rescue service told AFP.
"We can't predict it," he said.
Some people in Le Barp, a village around 30 kilometres south of Bordeaux, refused to evacuate, others said they did not know where to go.
Sebastien Piquet, a 50-year-old former soldier, said he was "not too worried" for the moment.
"My wife and son have evacuated, but I'm staying because I want to be able to help my brother-in-law, who runs a kennel with 60 dogs, if they need to be evacuated," he said.
The fire, believed to have started accidentally in the village of Saumos on Wednesday, has ravaged some 42,000 hectares and led to the evacuation of 220,000 people, making it one of the largest such operations in French history.
The city of Bordeaux was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, in recognition of its "outstanding urban and architectural ensemble."
(with newswires)
