Firefighters in Italy continue to battle raging blazes. Late Friday, some 150 people were trapped in two seaside areas in the port city of Catania, before being rescued.

Four people have died as the country reels from the devastation wreaked by the fires. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the country "will continue to take all necessary steps to heal our nation's wounds."

Amid the current heatwave, Italy is struggling to contain the wildfires that are raging around the country. In addition to the scorching heat, there is a variety of reasons why wildfires have become such a problem.

Fires rage in Castel di Lucio, Sicily. Emergency services are rushing to stem the blazes which are scorching parts of Italy's southern regions of Sicily and Calabria.

Blazes have destroyed forests in Greece and left families homeless, but the outlook is more mixed in Turkey due to rain in hard-hit areas. Follow DW for the latest.

As wildfires on Greece's Evia island continued to rage, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has promised compensation amid criticism of the state's handling of the disaster.

A timelapse video shows the sky above the island of Evia turning into a red haze during sunset due to the wildfires that have been raving the Greek island.

At least 42 people, including 25 soldiers, have reportedly died as large-scale wildfires broke out in Tizi Ouzou province, east of the country’s capital, Algiers, as seen on Tuesday. The fires engulfed both forests and residential areas, while firefighters were battling the blazes with water cannons. Some local volunteers assisted them in tackling the fire.

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“We're seeing wildfire seasons becoming longer and more intense all around the world,” says Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change. In the United States, Greece, Turkey and even Russia’s Siberia massive fires have ravaged forests and razed homes. Higher temperatures and prolonged droughts in many parts of the world are contributing to making the fires harder to extinguish.

Spain is on alert for wildfires as a heatwave that has enveloped southeastern Europe in recent days shifts west. Temperatures are forecast to reach highs of around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in much of the Iberian peninsula in the coming days. As firefighters try to extinguish a fire in Tarragona, forestry agents try to prevent a new fire from breaking out near Barcelona amid the worst heat wave in nearly 20 years.

In the vast and sparsely populated Siberian region of Russia, blazes have so far burned through more than 9.2 million hectares (22.7 million acres), an area the size of Portugal, according to Russia's forestry agency. The head of a Siberian region has urged residents to stay at home as smoke from raging forest fires raises health concerns.