A massive wildfire erupted on Saturday morning, July 25, 2025, on the island of Kythira. Initially appearing contained, the blaze intensified dramatically due to strong winds, scorching thousands of acres and devastating large swathes of land.
Professor Efthimis Lekkas, a leading expert, paints a grim picture for Kythira’s future. Much of the island was already ravaged by fires in 2017, and tragically, the current inferno has consumed many of the same areas that were just beginning to regenerate eight years later.
Lekkas warned that the island’s soil resources are severely degrading, significantly increasing the risk of subsequent floods. He emphasized that Kythira is being driven towards rapid desertification.
“Kythira is a unique environmental unit, characterized by distinct bio- and geo-environmental features,” Lekkas explained. He highlighted the island’s “extremely complex geological structure, intense neotectonic deformation, and geodynamic processes owing to its proximity to the Greek Seismic Arc. The unique soil morphology, geological formation composition, soil resources, and unparalleled flora and fauna are all dominant elements of its environmental peculiarity.”
Related: UN Warns One Third of Greece Threatened by Desertification
He recalled the 2017 fires, which burned over 100,000 acres in Kythira’s central forest network. Research conducted immediately afterward by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens’ “Environmental, Disaster and Crisis Management Strategies” program revealed the fires’ profound impact on the ecosystem, groundwater, surface waters, flooding, and soil temperature.
Despite the immense destruction, flora and fauna had shown clear signs of recovery in recent years, a testament to the island’s unique resilience.
The wildfire is a “huge blow” to the environment of Kythira
However, the recent “large forest fire has spread to almost the same area where the 2017 fire occurred, and is a huge blow to Kythira’s existing environmental situation,” Lekkas stated. He expressed little hope for the recovery of the burned forest, which had just begun to regenerate.
The new wildfire has significantly degraded soil resources, exponentially increasing the potential for erosion. This makes it incredibly difficult for natural flora and crops to grow, threatening the extinction of a special environment vital for activities like beekeeping.
Surface waters, which typically supply areas like the waterfalls in Mylopotamos, are now highly likely to cause intense flooding, while groundwater infiltration will be severely limited, leading to significant qualitative and quantitative degradation of underground aquifers.
“All of this constitutes the rapid desertification of Kythira,” Lekkas concluded, “meaning the complete inability of the area to support natural processes and human activities.”
To mitigate Kythira’s further environmental degradation, Lekkas stressed the urgent need for a multidisciplinary program of actions from both central and local authorities. He emphasized that the development of such a program must be continuously evaluated, as human interventions in post-disaster environmental processes often hinder rather than contribute to recovery.
Related: Kythera: The Greek Island Where History Meets Beauty
