Wildfires Hit Greece and Belgium in a Fire Season Stretching Beyond the Mediterranean
Two people died and hundreds were evacuated on the Greek island of Salamis on Sunday 16 August 2026, after two fires broke out on the island near Athens, according to a fire department spokesperson quoted by AFP (The Guardian; Straits Times; NAMPA). The bodies of the two victims were recovered from the Peristeria beach area of Salamis. The island sits in the Saronic Gulf, a short distance from Piraeus, Greece's largest port.
The Salamis fires are one thread in a wider pattern of wildfire activity stretching across the European continent this week. On Friday, a fire engulfed homes in a Croatian holiday resort, killing one person, injuring 40, and forcing 1,200 people to evacuate (The Guardian). The EU has warned that pockets of "very extreme" wildfire conditions stretch across Europe (The Guardian).
The most striking development is not in the Mediterranean, where summer fire seasons are an established pattern, but in eastern Belgium. A wildfire that broke out on Friday in the High Fens, a nature reserve in Liège province popular with hikers, had ravaged 3,000 hectares (7,413 acres) of land and was encroaching on the German border by early Sunday morning (The Guardian). Officials described the fire as the largest in Belgium's modern history. The High Fens, a raised peat bog ecosystem, last experienced comparable destruction in 1911, when massive wildfires swept the area during a drought.
About 600 people in the municipalities of Waimes and Bütgenbach were told to evacuate. Around 20 of them spent the night in a sports hall; others sought refuge with family and friends. Access to Bütgenbach lake was prohibited on Sunday to allow firefighting aircraft to refill.
The cross-border response has been substantial. Provincial governor Hervé Jamar said more than 250 firefighters and emergency staff were involved, including firefighters deployed from Germany. Air support came from two water-bombing aircraft sent by Sweden and four helicopters, two Belgian and two Dutch. Belgium's interior minister, Bernard Quintin, visited the crisis centre in Vottem on Sunday and reported that two fire fronts, those advancing toward Jalhay and Monschau, were under control (The Guardian).
The multinational deployment to the High Fens is itself noteworthy. Sweden contributing water-bombing aircraft, the Netherlands supplying helicopters, and German firefighters operating on Belgian soil all point to the EU's growing reliance on cross-border civil protection mechanisms, arrangements that let member states share emergency resources when national capacity is overwhelmed. The fact that a temperate northern European country like Belgium needed this scale of assistance shows how far outside the typical Mediterranean fire zone the current conditions extend.
Greece's institutional infrastructure for wildfire response remains active. The Greek Civil Protection ministry maintains daily fire-risk prediction maps on its website, including maps dated for 16 and 17 August 2026 (civilprotection.gov.gr). The ministry also operates the 112 emergency number, which has mass-notification capability for natural disasters or dangerous events in progress (civilprotection.gov.gr).
The Salamis deaths and the Croatian resort fire, taken together with the unprecedented scale of the Belgian blaze, form a picture of a fire season that is geographically broader than the Mediterranean-centric model European planners have historically worked from. The High Fens fire is particularly significant because it occurred in a peat bog ecosystem at a latitude where large-scale wildfire response capabilities have not historically been a core pillar of national emergency planning. The 1911 precedent in the same location shows that these ecosystems are not immune to fire, but the gap of more than a century between comparable events means that institutional memory, equipment, and tactical doctrine for fighting peat fires in this region are thin.
The broader context here is what the EU's characterisation of "very extreme" conditions across the continent, rather than in isolated pockets, means for policy. It suggests that the operational assumption, that southern European members face the acute wildfire risk while northern members contribute assistance, may be breaking down. When Belgium requires Swedish aircraft and Dutch helicopters to contain a blaze on its own soil, the donor-recipient calculus within European civil protection arrangements shifts. Countries that have traditionally been net contributors to cross-border firefighting efforts may need to reassess their own domestic preparedness at a time when the fires are arriving on multiple fronts simultaneously.
