TRANSCRIPT
(Sounds of fire crackling)
Anastasia Spiliopoulou walks beside the charred remains of a beach bar in the village of Kamina, in western Greece.
It's one of many buildings destroyed as a fast-moving wildfire swept through villages near Patras, the third largest city in Greece, west of Athens.
The 38-year-old chef says it will take a long time to recover from the damage.
"It holds memories. Because I enjoyed working in this kitchen. Cooking was my hobby, both at home and here Now there's nothing left. Most important is that the owner is in good health, and we are all safe at home. I am not the only one, there are two more women working here, one from Kaminia and one from Kato Achaia. I was not the only one."
Nearly 100 square kilometres have burned in the surrounding Achaia region in two days.
57-year-old restaurant owner Dimitris Daskas was injured trying to fight a fire in nearby Vrachneika.
"The house over there, their clothes, the wall, it was all burned, it must be torn down, it is no longer inhabitable. My arm, I broke it over there, I fell on it and broke it as I was bringing the extinguishers, here we had no electricity, no water... Five hours before the fire came here we had no water."
He says his village was left to fend for itself, despite multiple attempts to contact authorities.
"No one’s plot was clear, there was dry grass two metres high. I told them yesterday, I have been making phone calls since 11pm, I posted on Facebook, I made announcements...no one listened. My wife was calling to say we are on fire, they didn’t even pick up. There was no trace of the fire brigade up here. They focused on the villages, it makes sense, but we are also part of the village, we are the last house of Patras."
Wildfires have also forced the evacuation of several villages and a hotel on the tourist islands of Zakynthos and Cephalonia in the Ionian sea, along with parts of the mainland.
The fires aren't contained to Greece- fanned by an intense heatwave and strong winds, wildfires have wreaked destruction across southern Europe, burning homes and forcing thousands of residents and tourists to flee in recent days.
More than 5,000 people have been evacuated in the northern Spanish regions of Castile and Leon, where high winds continue to hamper firefighting efforts.
27-year old resident of Sarracin de Aliste village, Javier Baladron, has joined volunteers fighting to contain nearby fires.
"The wind isn’t helping a lot, it's against us. The fire brigades, with carts and bulldozers, it’s complicated for them to extinguish the fire because there are several active fires in different towns. It is getting more complicated for them."
At least six large fires continue to burn out of control in Spain, according to regional emergency services, and conditions are expected to remain challenging, with a 10-day heatwave forecast to last until early next week, according to Spain's state weather agency.
And across the border, about 3,000 firefighters continue to battle a series of wildfires across Portugal, with the country under a state of alert until Friday - in light of the extreme risk of wildfires.
In the small village of Casal Do Monte in the country's north, a French tourist, Cindy, has joined residents trying to prevent encroaching fires from reaching the village.
"Well it’s quite impressive, we’re in between two fires, it’s been going on for several days. It’s going to surround us, there are woods all around us, so we’re thinking it’s going to burn rapidly."
Senior Fire Management Expert at the European Forest Institute Alexander Held says firefighters across Spain and Portugal are facing extreme hot and dry conditions, and the fire danger is exacerbated by unprepared landcapes.
He says dealing with multiple fires at the same time is extremely difficult.
"Multiple fires at the same time are a huge problem for the responders because suddenly you don't have one incident, you have ten, maybe 50 fires going. So in terms of resources, do you have enough? No, you don't have enough. Coordination priorities. Then you have don't only have the fires, then you have to evacuate settlements and people. So it's firefighting plus evacuation. So it's incidents within incidents in this in multiple scales."
Fire has affected nearly 4,400 square kilometres across Europe so far in 2025, which is double the average for the same period of the year in 2006, according to the European Union Science Hub's Joint Research Centre.
Spain alone has recorded more than 1300 square kilometres have been burned this year, while Portugal has seen more than 6,200 square kilometres consumed by flames, according to annual statistics from the European Forest Fire Information System.
Mr Held says the figures show that climate change is making fires more intense and more frequent, with hotter, drier summers increasing risk.
"We do see these conditions coming more frequently. We see more often uncontrollable, very fast, very intense fires. So it is fair to expect that in the near future we have more of this. And the climate predictions also point in that direction."
The Balkan region has also been hit by a series of wildfires, following weeks of high temperatures and very little rain.
Firefighters continue to fight flames near the village of Kosor near Montenegro's capital, Podgorica; and several major wildfires continue to burn across Albania.
In Montenegro's mountainous area northeast of the capital Podgorica, one army soldier was killed - and another badly injured - when a water tanker they were operating rolled over.
The soldier is one of three men to have died in the fires across Europe in recent days, prompting renewed calls for safety and the need to stay alert and informed.
