Helicopters dumped water over a burning forest in South Korea on Thursday as authorities struggled to contain the country's worst-ever wildfires, which have killed 26 people, forced at least 37,000 others to flee their homes and destroyed more than 300 structures.

South Korea’s forest service said thousands of fighters are tackling at least five active wildfire nationwide.

The fires have burned over 81,500 acres of land. At least 26 people are dead and two temples, both hundreds of years old, have been destroyed

South Korea has raised the crisis alert to its highest level and declared "a full-scale national response" to bring the fires under control.

Kim Doo-gyeom of Ulsan city cites limitations in fighting the devastating blaze, saying it is not easy to send women into ‘rugged mountain areas’.

Multiple wildfires fuelled by strong winds and dry weather have been raging across South Korea’s south-eastern regions since last Friday.

Officials in the South Korean city of Andong have alerted residents to evacuate to safe areas as firefighters struggled to contain wildfires that ravaged the country’s southern regions since last week,

Strong winds, dense forest and unusually dry weather - that's the deadly combination that experts say is fuelling the largest wildfires in South Korea's history. The inferno in the south-east has burned through 35,