Some 30,000 people fled the flames on Rhodes at the weekend, the country’s largest-ever wildfire evacuation.
Police said 16,000 people had been transported on land and 3,000 evacuated by sea. Others had to flee by road or used their own transport after being told to leave the area.
“We are exhausted and traumatized,” said Daniel-Cladin Schmidt, a 42-year-old German tourist waiting to be evacuated with his wife and nine-year-old son.
“There were thousands of people, the buses couldn’t pass, we had to walk for more than two hours,” he told AFP at the airport.
“We couldn’t breathe, we just covered our faces and moved forward.”
Holiday-makers and some locals spent the night in gyms, schools and hotel conference centers on the island.
In the departures hall of the international airport, AFP saw groups of tourists sleeping on the floor, surrounded by luggage.
“We had to lend a woman some of my wife’s clothes because she had nothing to wear,” Kevin Sales, an engineer from England, told AFP. “It was awful.”
Several travel companies have halted their inbound tourist flights to Rhodes, and have been helping to ferry foreigners home.
“We ran 10 kilometers with all our luggage to escape the flames”, while the temperature was 42 degrees Celsius, said German tourist Lena Schwarz, after arriving at Hanover airport overnight Sunday into Monday.
The 38-year-old told AFP their journey leaving Rhodes was “hell on Earth”.
Oxana Neb, 50, also arriving at Hanover, said the evacuation had been “very bad”.
“We stayed in the hotel until the end and fire came from all sides,” she said.
She joined other guests running to the beach, eventually abandoning her suitcases on the way, she said.
Like every summer, Greece is plagued by forest fires, often deadly, ravaging tens of thousands of hectares of forest and vegetation.
This summer, Greece experienced one of the longest heatwaves in recent years, according to experts, with the thermometer hitting 45 degrees Celsius at the weekend.
Temperatures eased Monday but were expected to pick up again on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Rhodes on Tuesday remains at the highest level of fire alert, alongside Crete.
