Wildfires and Heat Transform Italy and Greece Into Tourism Nightmares

As a family sat vigil over a coffin containing the body of an elderly relative, the wooded hills around their apartment building in Palermo burned from wildfires. Winds blew the blazes closer, torching cars, dumpsters, sheds and electricity poles. Then the flames licked the apartment building, forcing its inhabitants to flee.

“We wanted to leave the house, but then the flames were behind the door,” a resident told Live Sicilia television. She said she and her family wrapped their faces in wet towels and, looking for a way out, “knocked on the door where there was the cadaver.” They all managed to escape before the coffin and the rest of the house went up in flames.

Things could hardly be worse for Italy and its Mediterranean neighbors this month. Wildfires and successive heat waves transformed their summer paradises into ghoulish hellscapes. Fires in Greece caused wartime-scale airlifts of tourists and ammunition depots to explode. Sicilian churches burned with the relics of saints inside them. And if it was not the heat, it was hail — the size of billiards in northern Italy — as the country ricocheted between weather extremes.

It was bad enough for those who lived there. But the many tourists who had come looking for a summer holiday found an inferno, and there was more than a hint of buyer’s remorse.

“This was not a good idea,” said Maria Turkovic, 64, from Bosnia, as she prepared for a 2 p.m. tour of the Colosseum in the middle of the heat wave. She sought the shade of a short bush across from the landmark as the temperature hovered around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and a nearby ambulance checked the blood pressure of another tourist.

“My head is burning,” she said. Rather than a vacation, she said she felt trapped in a “nightmare.”

Even as the Mediterranean’s high fever finally broke this past week thanks to the influx of North Atlantic air, the realization that it was not even August — when new bouts of extreme heat are anticipated — dampened any sense of relief. Tour operators, officials and tourists across the region are wondering what happens when a preferred destination for summer getaways becomes a place you absolutely must get away from in the summer.

Countries like Italy and Greece, which increasingly depend on tourism — particularly summer tourism — are staring at a bleak and smoke-filled future, while the damp and chilly places normally shunned by travelers see a future in the sun.

Tourism would drop by 9 percent…