Major fire in southern Italy – PB nearly torched

The position in Greece is very very similar to that in the south of Italy. The type of countyrside and terrain is almost identical. Rough hilly countryside criss-crossed by inaccessible and heavily overgrown ravines.

Both are mainly populated by static elderly agriculturally based communities. Both are largely inaccessible other than from a small network of really narrow tracks, suitable for a car in places, but only if driven really slowly and carefully. These tracks typically follow the contours of the countryside and often lead only to a long abandoned old farmhouse or shack. It is really easy to get lost, or worse still utterly stuck. You can’t go on, you can’t turn round as it it too narrow, and you can’t reverse back as it is way too dangerous.

In southern Italy the area set fire to was in a National Park and the entire area is protected by a whole variety of environmental laws and directives. I suspect (but do not know for sure) that the fire area in Greece is much the same in this respect.

In Italy this sort of fire is an annual event. The main Italian holiday starts on the first weekend in August. We were there for two weeks beforehand and there were no fires anywhere. On Sunday 5th August, fires broke out all over the region. There were literally dozens of them and large areas of overgrown and inacessible hillside were torched.

It was really obvious that these fires were deliberately set. The locals blamed the visiting Neapolitans of course – as they do for everything. Personally, I think that most of it was done by farmers burning off weeds and scrub so that they could clear the land for the September olive harvest. Some of it may have been done by developers – but given the wholesale ignoring of any laws down there, somehow I doubt it.