More than 1,500 people were evacuated when a fire broke out on the southeastern tip of Crete, most of them tourists.
When a wildfire spread on the Greek island of Crete this week, Fanouris Vatsinas quickly made arrangements to move dozens of guests from the hotel he owns. Yet he could not bring himself to leave.
“But then,” he said, “the fire reached the hotel, and the firefighters came to get me, too.”
Greece has endured repeated wildfires in recent years and has tried to invest in equipment and workers to prevent or fight them. But the outbreaks keep spreading to new places, hitting the populous mainland and islands. Fires have razed hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and rattled the tourism industry, with images of burning landscapes competing with idyllic vacation snaps.
The wildfire in Crete began on Wednesday afternoon and burned late into Thursday on the rugged mountains surrounding Ierapetra, a town on the southeast coast of the island. About 1,500 people, mostly tourists, were evacuated. Greece, like much of southern Europe, has been experiencing a heat wave that has created hot and dry conditions. The fire spread quickly once lit, leaping in the wind.
There were no reports of injuries or major damage to property on the island, Greece’s largest and one of its most popular tourist destinations. Because of Crete’s size, the fire posed less risk than those that engulfed smaller islands in recent years. In Evros in northern Greece, a wildfire killed 20 people in 2023, and another in 2018 east of Athens killed 104.
Kathy Kearns, a California native who was visiting the island for the sixth year in a row, said she had shifted her vacation to earlier in the year to avoid the extreme heat and threats of wildfires.
