Wildfires Wreak Havoc Across Southern Europe

On Wednesday, wildfires fanned by a heatwave and strong winds wreaked destruction across southern Europe, burning homes and forcing thousands of residents and tourists to flee, Reuters reported (8-14-25).

The blazes have scorched nearly 440,000 hectares (1.09 million acres) in the eurozone so far in 2025, double the average for the same period since 2006, according to the EU Science Hub’s Joint Research Center.

In Greece, authorities ordered residents of a town of about 7,700 near Patras to evacuate on Tuesday and issued new alerts Wednesday for two nearby villages. On the Greek islands of Chios in the east and Cephalonia in the west, both popular with tourists, authorities told residents and visitors to move to safety as fires spread.

In Spain, a volunteer firefighter died from severe burns and several people were hospitalized as state weather agency AEMET warned that almost all of the country faced extreme or very high fire risk.

Regional officials said a 35-year-old man attempting to create firebreaks near Nogarejas in the central Castile and Leon region was trapped in the blaze. He was the sixth wildfire fatality this year in Spain, following the deaths of two firefighters in Tarragona and Avila, according to emergency services.

Alexander Held, a senior fire management expert at the European Forest Institute, said that unprepared landscapes put firefighters’ lives at risk and called for buffer zones and the removal of combustible vegetation.