FRENCH authorities gave the go-ahead today for 84,000 evacuees forced out by a monster wildfire to go back to their homes in south-west France.

The move is the strongest sign yet that firefighters are turning a corner in their battle against the flames that have burnt an area four times the size of Paris.

The authorised returns announced today covered nine localities that had been evacuated. In all, more than 220,000 people have been forced to flee their homes since last week.

Higher humidity, cooler temperatures and slight rain raised hopes that Thursday could be a decisive step on the way to vanquishing the fire.

Local officials reported a “rather calm” night, with a fire that has not grown beyond the about 162 square miles already affected. Fire crews remained at “total mobilisation” with 2,200 firefighters and over 20 aircraft.

Rain fell early Thursday in the city of Bordeaux to the east.

Sophie Brocas, the prefect for the Gironde region, expressed some optimism that lower temperatures could help.

“If that’s confirmed, we could foresee a return to a more normal life for residents, but also for businesses that need to work,” she told reporters late on Wednesday.

Humidity reached 80 per cent overnight but was expected to drop by midday, authorities said. 

Some rainfall was expected along the coast that “could reach the fire zone,” Gironde officials said in a morning note.

Temperatures that peaked around 40°C (104°F) a day earlier were set to drop Thursday to around 27°C along the coast. 

An “orange” heat wave alert, the second-highest level after “red,” was lifted shortly before dawn.

The fires in the Bordeaux wine-growing, forested and tourism-heavy region are among the blazes that have swept across pockets of southern Europe in recent weeks, including Spain and Greece.

On Thursday, firefighters were tackling multiple forest fires in four of Turkey’s western provinces, the Anadolu news agency reported.

Blazes in touristic Mugla and Antalya and elsewhere raged overnight as hot weather and strong winds gripped the region. Residents were evacuated as teams with firefighting planes and helicopters battled the fires.

A day earlier, authorities in neighbouring Greece said three firefighters had died on the island of Crete, as the wildfire emergency stretched from the Atlantic coast to the eastern Mediterranean.

At the peak of the evacuations, a third of a million people were driven from homes and holiday sites in France and Spain.