This is the terrifying moment a giant ‘tsunami cloud’ slammed into a French beach as a raging new 45C heatwave hits Europe.

Dramatic footage from the coastline in Hendaye shows beachgoers frantically escaping the galerne — a violent meteorological phenomenon characterised by an abrupt drop in temperature and fierce, northwesterly winds.

Hundreds of tourists on the Basque coast could be seen anxiously grabbing their surfboards, rubber rings and towels as they rushed to safety.

‘It was like a tornado: all of a sudden, the wind picks up, people get up and leave, and it turns dark. We had sunshine, but then, all at once, it clouded over and turned misty,’ one woman told Franceinfo.

‘It was sublime, but very unsettling. We’re used to seeing the “enbata” (the local word for the galerne storm) on the beach, but the scale of this was unlike anything we’d ever seen,’ a man said.

Swimmers enjoying the 38C heat on Sunday suddenly faced flying parasols, blinding sandstorms and a jarringly rapid drop in temperature of 11C in just six minutes.

The same phenomenon occurred in Biarritz, which had just broken its all-time heat record of 42.9C in the late afternoon. Within minutes, a powerful westerly wind forced the temperature down to 23C.

Galernes occur on the Basque coast when cold maritime air from the Bay of Biscay arrives over warmer land, producing violent gusts of up to 59mph.

A new heatwave, expected to last at least a week, is about to hit neighbouring Italy, where inland areas of Sardinia are expected to reach 45C between Thursday and Friday.

‘It’s a rather mesmerising situation – one I’ve experienced myself,’ Sébastien Léas, a forecaster at Météo-France, told 20 minutes about the sudden storm.

‘You see a wall of humidity coming in from the open sea; it might be visible ten minutes before the storm, but not an hour before.’

He continued: ‘It was around 39C in Hendaye, and the wind there became oceanic, much cooler and more humid, causing a sudden shift from dry heat to humid coolness.’

Galernes are more severe on the Basque coast due to the topography of the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mountains, which channel the cold maritime air along the coastline.

Europe is enduring its third heatwave of the summer, with tinder-dry vegetation and high temperatures fuelling blazes from the Iberian Peninsula to France.

Many scientists say climate change is making wildfires more frequent and difficult to combat.

Firefighters battled through the night to tackle a blaze that tore through a historic forest near Paris on Tuesday, with at least two people arrested on suspicion of having started the fire near one of France’s best-known royal palaces.

‘It is not under control,’ Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said late on Monday, adding that the main blaze in Fontainebleau and another one nearby that started on Monday afternoon had scorched 1,300 hectares (3,212 acres).

Nunez said the fire was just a few kilometres away from the Palace of Fontainebleau, which explained the deployment of considerable resources, including water-carrying planes and helicopters.

For the first time, Canadair aircraft on Monday skimmed the River Seine to fill their tanks, attempting to contain a blaze that turned the sky black.

Just 40 miles from Paris, the fire forced the closure of the A6 highway linking the capital with Lyon and the south. Smaller fires in the area also disrupted high-speed train services.

As many as 900 people were evacuated from their homes.

Nunez said the Fontainebleau blaze is contributing to what will likely be a historic year for fires in France, with 32,000 hectares of land — roughly the size of Orlando, Florida — burned already this year, more than the total in 2025.

‘We’ll probably have a record year,’ he said. ‘We expected this with this major drought.’

European countries reported more than 10,000 excess deaths during the record-breaking heatwave that engulfed the west of the continent in late June, official data showed.

The extreme heatwave disrupted power supplies, shut schools, and smashed temperature ​records in France, Spain ​and the UK.

The vast majority of fatalities — more ​than 9,000 — were among people aged 65 and above, according to data published by ‌EuroMOMO, a network backed by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organisation.

Extreme heat can kill by causing heat stroke, or aggravating cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, with older people among the most ​vulnerable.

‘To have this kind of excess at this time of year is unusual. It’s ​really high,’ Lasse Vestergaard, Chief Physician at Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut, which hosts ⁠EuroMOMO, told Reuters.

‘It is difficult to explain this high excess mortality by anything but the extreme ​heat,’ Vestergaard added.

Scientists have said the late-June heatwave would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without human-caused climate change, ​which is making heatwaves more frequent and intense.

The data, pooled from national mortality statistics in 27 European countries, included excess deaths from all causes, not just heat-related ones, during the week of June 22 to 28, when ​the heatwave peaked in France, Spain, Britain and other countries.

But scientists said there were no other ​known major factors, such as COVID-19 outbreaks, that would have contributed to the spike to 10,650 excess deaths in that week.

Belgium’s excess mortality was the ​highest during any ⁠heatwave in records going back to 2000, according to the country’s public health institute Sciensano.

A separate scientific study, published on Monday, estimated 2,700 people died from heat-related causes in England and Wales alone, during ⁠the ​May and June heatwaves.

Of those deaths, 42 per cent were caused by ​the extra heat that global warming contributed to the heatwaves, according to the findings by Imperial College London, the UK ​Met Office and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Some 26 million people in France were under a red heatwave warning on Monday, including the greater Paris region.

Forecasters say the heatwave is expected to continue until the middle of the week.

In Italy, a dome of scorching air originating from Africa will this week cause the temperature to reach the highest peaks of the third heat wave of the season.

In Aglientu, northern Sardinia, where temperatures have already 37C, firefighters had to quickly evacuate tourists due to flames spreading in a nearby pine forest.

Sicily also reported the death of a 78-year-old man, who died in a fire that broke out on his land due to strong winds while burning brushwood.

The current bout of hot weather follows scorching temperatures at the end of May and the end of June, which broke several daily records.

Extreme weather gripping the region has damaged crops, affected power output from nuclear plants and increased freight transport costs along the Rhine river in Germany, where lower water levels have prevented cargo vessels from sailing fully loaded.

In Italy, farmers in the Emilia-Romagna region are forced to deploy more resources to ensure proper livestock management and maintain constant production of dairy products such as Parmesan cheese.