Peloponnese: two fires in Kalavryta and Gortynia

Two forest fires broke out an hour apart on the afternoon of Tuesday 18 August 2026 in neighbouring mountain zones of the northern Peloponnese. The first started in a forest area at Rogoi in Kalavryta, in Achaia, with the Fire Service Operations Centre being notified at around 18:30. Ten firefighters with a foot patrol team of the 6th ΕΜΟΔΕ and two vehicles were mobilised for the firefighting effort, while one helicopter operated from the air.

At around 19:30 the Fire Service was notified of a second fire in a forest area, this time in the Municipal Unit of Kleitor in Gortynia, in Arcadia. Six firefighters with three vehicles and one helicopter were deployed there. These are two distinct incidents with separate announcements, which nevertheless share the same meteorological background: lightning activity was being recorded in both areas, while in Gortynia there was also rainfall at the same time. Neither incident was accompanied by a 112 message or by evacuations.

That background is reflected in the data from meteo.gr and the National Observatory of Athens. On the basis of the Lightning Imager instrument on the Meteosat-12 weather satellite, from the start of the twenty-four-hour period until 18:00 Greek time more than 5,000 electrical discharges were recorded over Greece, mainly over mountainous and mainland parts of the country. As meteo clarifies, the term “electrical discharges” includes both cloud-to-ground lightning and discharges between clouds or between clouds and the surrounding air — so they are not all strikes that hit the ground.

Some media attributed the ignition directly to lightning; the Fire Service updates, however, did not specify a cause and confined themselves to noting lightning activity in the areas. That discrepancy has not been resolved. Dry thunderstorms, where the rain evaporates before reaching the ground while the discharges continue, are a classic cause of forest fires in mountain zones in August. The intense lightning activity kept the firefighting forces on alert, since there was a risk of new fronts breaking out. On the same day the Fire Service was also operating in Volos and on Corfu.