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Emergency services say the front of the fire is under control as weather conditions improve.
Hundreds of firefighters battled a forest fire west of the Greek capital Athens on Tuesday, and as the weather improved, they put the main front of the fire under control.
Accompanied by 16 planes and the army, more than 270 firefighters battled the blaze in the Geraneia Mountains, authorities say it is “one of the largest” in decades.
Speaking to local ANT1 TV on Saturday, fire chief Stefanos Kolokouris said better weather conditions allowed firefighters to control the front of the outbreak late Friday, but that “several assets and scattered” remain on fire.
He was not injured, but several houses were damaged or destroyed and a dozen villages and hamlets were evacuated.
Euthymios Lekkas, a professor of environmental disaster management at the University of Athens, said fires 90 kilometers (55 miles) from Athens have burned more than 55 square kilometers (21 square miles) of pine and other land, some of them agricultural.
“It’s a huge ecological disaster that needs work to prevent landslides and flooding in the fall,” he told ERT public television.
The extent of the damage, especially for farmers, will be clear when the fire is fully controlled, the civil protection agency said.
The fire started late on Wednesday near the town of Schinos near the Loutraki station in the Gulf of Corinth, apparently by someone burning vegetation in an olive grove.
The smoke of the fire drowned Athens from the sky with ashes. It was the first forest fire of the season.
Greece experiences violent forest fires every summer, with dry weather, strong winds and temperatures often rising from 30 C (86 Fahrenheit).
In 2018, 102 people were killed at the coastal resort of Mati, near Athens, in the worst fire disaster ever in Greece.
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