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Europe|1,500 People Evacuated as Wildfire Rages on Greek Island of Crete
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/world/europe/tourists-evacuated-crete-wildfire.html
Most of those fleeing the blaze were tourists as firefighters struggled against heavy winds to bring the flames under control.
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July 3, 2025Updated 9:51 a.m. ET
About 1,500 people, many of them tourists, were evacuated from hotels and homes on the Greek island of Crete on Thursday as firefighters struggled to control a wildfire in arid conditions.
Greece, like much of southern Europe, has been experiencing a heat wave that has created the hot and dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires. On Crete, temperatures were forecast to hover between 33 and 36 degrees Celsius, or 91.4 to 96.8 Fahrenheit, and Greece’s meteorological service issued an alert for extremely high temperatures.
Firefighters were also working to douse smaller blazes on the Greek mainland, and Greece’s civil protection ministry issued an orange alert signaling a “very high” risk of fires for Friday in the Athens area, the southern Peloponnese peninsula and several Aegean Islands.
In Crete, more than 200 firefighters worked to douse the blaze from several angles in the sweltering heat, but their work was made more difficult by gale-force winds and rugged mountain terrain, Greece’s fire service spokesman, Vassilis Vathrakoyiannis, told a televised news conference.
Wind gusts of up to about 50 miles per hour were “creating new spots and fronts, making the firefighting effort much more difficult,” he said.
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The fire began in villages outside Ierapetra, a city on the island’s southwestern coast. As it spread overnight and into Thursday, the island’s authorities, including members of the coast guard, hustled to evacuate hundreds of people.
About 1,200 of those were tourists, said the mayor, Manolis Frangoulis. There were no reports of injuries or deaths.
“It was like hell on earth,” the mayor said. “There were thousands of patches of fire, springing up everywhere each time the wind blew and threw blazing pine cones this way and that.”
Kathy Kearns, 68, who was visiting the village of Agios Ioannis, decided to pack her bags after seeing black smoke billowing over the horizon on Wednesday evening.
“Since I live in California, I know this scenario well,” she said. “The wind blows embers for miles.”
Many more tourists boarded buses to other hotels and centers that had been set up on safer parts of the island, with the glow of wildfires in the background, according to video broadcast on Greek television.
In recent weeks, fires have devastated tens of thousands of acres of land in Greece. Last month, a fire on the island of Khios burned nearly 15,000 acres of forest and officials evacuated dozens of communities.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times.
