Tour operators flew more than 2,000 holidaymakers home as wildfires raged on the island of Rhodes in what the Greek government said was the largest evacuation ever undertaken in the country.
More repatriation flights are due today and tomorrow as the fires remained out of control and the Civil Protection authority warned the threat of further fires was high in almost every part of Greece, gripped by a heatwave.
Fires burning since Wednesday on Rhodes forced 19,000 people to leave homes and hotels over the weekend as an inferno reached coastal resorts on the island's southeast.
A wildfire on the island of Corfu also led to the evacuation of about 2,400 visitors and locals from Corfu overnight, a fire service spokesman said, adding that the departures were a precaution.
Greece has been sweltering under a lengthy spell of extreme heat that has exacerbated wildfire risk and left visitors stranded in peak tourist season.
"For the next few weeks we must be on constant alert. We are at war, we will rebuild what we lost, we will compensate those who were hurt," Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told parliament.
"The climate crisis is already here, it will manifest itself everywhere in the Mediterranean with greater disasters."
Kelly Squirrel, a transport administrator from the UK, said police had ordered people from her hotel on Rhodes to evacuate.
"We had to keep walking," she told AFP at the international airport. "So we walked for about six hours in the heat."
Rhodes, which counted 2.5 million visitor arrivals in 2022, is one of Greece's leading holiday destinations, while Corfu is also popular with overseas visitors.
Greek television broadcast images of long lines of people, some in beachwear, lugging suitcases along the island's roads on Saturday, when the evacuations were ordered.
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Some 30,000 people fled the flames on Rhodes at the weekend, the country's largest-ever wildfire evacuation.
Police said the authorities had transported 16,000 people across land, and evacuated 3,000 by sea.
Others had to flee by road or used their own transport after being told to leave the area.
"We had to lend a woman some of my wife's clothes because she had nothing to wear," Kevin Sales, an engineer from England, told AFP. "It was terrible."
Tourists and some locals spent the night in gyms, schools and hotel conference centres on the island.
Several travel companies have halted their inbound tourist flights to Rhodes, but have been helping to ferry foreigners home.
Crews have been battling the flames in parts of Greece for about a week, and firefighters were using aircraft to try to douse the flames on Rhodes from dawn today.
According to the authorities, many regions of the country were under extreme risk of forest fires on Monday, but no towns were directly threatened by flames on Sunday night, the fire service told AFP.
Like every summer, Greece is plagued by forest fires, often deadly, ravaging tens of thousands of hectares of forest and vegetation.
This summer, the country experienced one of the longest heatwaves in recent years, according to experts, with temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius at the weekend.
Today, the temperature was expected to drop slightly with temperatures expected to reach 37C in Athens, but tomorrow, the heat is expected to pick up again.
Ryanair and Aer Lingus flights are operating as normal to Greece.
The Department of Foreign Affairs has advised Irish citizens to be alert, follow local advice and stay away from affected areas.
