Preveli: palm forest green again in 2-3 years

The palm forest of Preveli suffered its worst damage since 2010 in the recent fire in the southern prefecture of Rethymno. Speaking to Orange Press Agency, Eleftheria Antaloudaki, a botanist and head of department at the Natural History Museum of Crete, describes the palm as a resilient species “that can withstand such disturbances, so it can regenerate”. Her estimate for natural recovery, that is for the area turning green again, is two to three years, on condition that there is no new fire or additional pressure on the ecosystem. Part of the forest remained untouched, but the greatest number of palms is at the river mouth and it is precisely those that burned, which explains why the image of the destruction is so stark for anyone approaching from the shore.

The reason a burned palm forest is not necessarily a lost one lies in the biology of the tree itself. The palm stores water inside its trunk, and provided the central inner part is not burned, the tree puts out new growth within a few years. The fire can therefore strip the foliage and leave blackened trunks behind without having killed the population. The botanist herself, however, draws a clear distinction: turning green again is one thing, and the full restoration of the structure, composition and ecological function of an ecosystem is another, which can take many decades. This habitat is found nowhere else in Europe apart from Crete and the Canary Islands, while the Natural History Museum of Crete takes part, together with the Canaries, in a European programme for the conservation of the Theophrastus palm.

For the Municipality of Agios Vasileios and for the whole southern axis of Rethymno, Preveli is not simply a natural landscape but one of the strongest tourist destinations in the area, with visitor numbers peaking in the summer months. Tourist pressure is cited by the botanist herself as a risk factor for recovery, since regrowth requires time and relative quiet on the ground where the new shoots come up. The area also already has a burdened record: the damage of 2010 serves today both as a point of comparison and as a precedent for how long recovery can take. At the same time, the municipality has other open infrastructure issues, such as the report on putting the network underground, which is directly linked to fire prevention.

The coming period depends on whether the area avoids a new fire and on how visitor numbers are managed during the period of regrowth. No restoration plan or restriction of access has been announced, nor a full record of how many palms burned compared with those that were saved. Fire protection around sensitive parts of Crete has in any case been strengthened in recent months, with measures such as the new fire protection plan in Agios Nikolaos and the thermal fire-detection cameras at Knossos and Phaistos. For Preveli, the critical factor remains time: if the forest is left to regrow without new disturbance, its appearance will begin to change within the next two years.