Mount Hymettus is to get its own forestry service, it was decided yesterday, just two weeks after a fire burned some 150 hectares of a particularly green part of the mountain which runs across Athens’s northeastern outskirts and suburbs.

The council of the Eastern Attica Prefecture met yesterday to discuss the issue in the wake of the fire and, in a majority decision, decided to give the green light for the creation of the service, much to the delight of the mayors of the 15 municipalities that border the mountain.

“This has been a longstanding demand of ours,” said the mayor of Vyronas, Nikos Chardalias.

Until now, the forestry service on Mount Pendeli, northern Athens, has been responsible for looking after the trees on Hymettus and has been stretched to its limit trying to offer any protection to the area.

“It is not possible for the Pendeli forestry service to keep an eye on an area that stretches from Sounion to Kapandriti,” said Chardalias, highlighting that more than 1 million people or “a tenth of Greece’s population” lives in the areas that surround the mountain.

A fire that began in Glyka Nera on the city’s northeastern outskirts two weeks ago was deemed to be the work of arsonists. A blaze last summer burned some 100 hectares of land near the suburbs of Holargos and Papagou. That was also thought to have been started intentionally.

Chardalias said that simply creating a forestry service would not be enough to protect Hymettus from land-grabbers and that the law would have to be changed so that not even light construction could take place on the mountainside.

“We are asking for the Zone B category to be scrapped and replaced by Zone A [which does not allow any building] since the former simply provides loopholes for all kind of activities to take place in the forest,” he said.