Finally rain in Greece.

Overnight rains in several devastated areas of the country contributed to an improvement in the fires front, which devastated more than 100,000 hectares, although the risks of a resumption of fires remained high on Thursday.

More than two weeks after the start of these fires of rare violence, which caused the death of three people, "we can be more optimistic today" than in the previous days, estimated the Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki.

But he also warned of the danger of a resurgence which remains high in this particularly hot and dry summer.

"We are in the middle of August and we still have difficult days ahead of us", he insisted, assuring that these fires had caused "an immense ecological disaster".

"Forests and lost property"

“We have succeeded in protecting thousands of people, but we have lost forests and property,” he told reporters.

"The climate crisis is here and it tells us that everything must change," continued the conservative leader, faced with the grumbling of victims who accuse him of having abandoned them to their fate.

But this is "not a Greek phenomenon", he insisted, citing Turkey, Italy and Algeria, also affected by major fires.

Some 586 fires, according to the Deputy Minister of Civil Protection, ravaged several regions of the country in a few days, offering a spectacle of desolation with charred buildings and a ransacked nature.

100,874 hectares of pine forests, forests and olive groves gone up in smoke in Greece

In total, from July 29 to August 12, 100,874 hectares of pine forests, forests and olive groves went up in smoke in Greece, according to calculations carried out by AFP using data from the European Information System on forest fires. forests (EFFIS).

Several fires were still in progress Thursday, in particular on the hard-hit island of Evia, and in three regions of the Peloponnese peninsula.

"The fronts of fires remain active" in the north of Evia and in Arcadia, Messinia and Mani, where "the resumptions are constant", told AFP a person in charge of the fire department.

Concern has also resurfaced in the far outskirts of the Greek capital, where a brush fire broke out Thursday morning in Aspropyrgos, an industrial area about thirty kilometers west of Athens.

At the height of the devastating fires caused by scorching temperatures in early August, the flames had charged the sky of the capital with 4 million inhabitants with gray smoke.

The worst heatwave in three decades

Greece, although used to the hot summer heat, was hit by the worst heatwave in three decades.

Thursday, it is also on the side of the weather that the eyes turned with a drop in temperatures expected with great relief in a country where the mercury has climbed largely above 40 ° at the beginning of August, with peaks at 45 °.

In Athens, the temperature should not exceed 34 ° Thursday with low rains expected, according to the weather services.

Experts unequivocally link this heat wave to climate change while a preliminary UN report, to which AFP had access, qualifies the Mediterranean area as a "hot spot of climate change".

"I am lost"

Rains fell overnight on the island of Evia, the Peloponnese and central Greece which helped "improve the situation," said Stathis Koulis, the mayor of Gortynia.

This village located in the mountainous and difficult to access region of Arcadia in the Peloponnese is the main incendiary focus of the peninsula.

Some 680 firefighters were mobilized day and night.

In northern Evia, where hundreds of residents had been evacuated by boat, 858 firefighters, including reinforcements from Ukraine, Romania or Serbia, were still battling relentlessly against the blaze.

In the devastated areas, the inhabitants could only observe with despair the extent of the damage, in particular the herders who lost their animals, charred by the fire.

"I am lost", sighs one of them, Kostis Angelou, met by AFP on the island of Evia while the carcasses of his 372 goats lie on the slopes of a blackened hill.

“We're finished, what do you want us to do?” Continues his father Spyros Angelou, 73 years old.

World

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