July’s big wildfires raze more than 13,000 hectares of woodland
Wildfires destroyed more than 13,000 hectares of forest and woodland in northern Greece, Attica, the eastern and southern Aegean, the central mainland and the Peloponnese in July – and that was just six, the biggest, of dozens of blazes that broke out across the country last month.
More specifically, from July 1 to 31, wildfires destroyed around 4,000 hectares in the national park of Dadia in Evros, northeastern Greece, 2,780 hectares on Mount Penteli near Athens, 2,450 on the island of Lesvos and 2,020 in Melambes on Crete, as well as 1,215 in Itea in the foothills of Mount Parnassos and 825 hectares in Arkadia in the Peloponnese.
According to an analysis by the National Observatory of Athens’ Flame – which studies extreme fire weather and behavior – of maps and data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and the Copernicus Emergency Mapping Service, the 13,290 hectares destroyed by those six wildfires last month accounted for around 60% of the roughly 21,500 hectares burned across the country from January 1 to the end of July.
