People sent to hospital in Athens as heatwave prompts health and wildfire fears

Athens is uncomfortably hot but the tourists still arrived at the Acropolis in droves.

With temperatures climbing rapidly to the high-30s Celsius (high-90s Fahrenheit), hundreds of people queued in the fierce sun and cicadas chirped from the tinder-dry scrub lining the stone path.

Kim Adams, visiting from Scotland with her son Lewis, said: “It’s quite difficult today, really very hot.

“There’s not much shade about. I probably would just have stayed on the boat today had I known it would be this hot.”

Irish tourist Julie Dorris said: “It’s unpleasant, especially coming from somewhere like Ireland where it’s so cold and damp and then you hit this heat and it’s hard to cope with.”

American tourists Shay and Andre Von said: “You definitely need water and you need to be in the shade.

“We’re from the American South and this is easily as bad. Nothing else to do but head to the pool.”

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The Hellenic Red Cross has put up big shade tents to protect the crowds and is handing out thousands of free bottles of water.

Volunteer Marina Stamati told me that dozens of people had been seen in mobile clinics with the early symptoms of heat exposure.

Some were sent to hospital as a precaution.

She said: “It’s very dangerous, this kind of heat. It’s going on for a long time, even at night, and so people aren’t able to get cool.”

People were finding inventive ways to try to beat the heat.

We saw one lady who had put a hat on her dog.

Lots of tourists used parasols and fans, and some used guidebooks to provide shelter from the relentless sun.

Like many other major cities in southern Europe, Athens takes climate change and rising temperatures seriously.

It has a chief heat officer to oversee worker protection measures and public health campaigns to help people avoid heat exposure.

Vasilis Kikilias, Greece’s minister of climate change and civil protection, told Sky News that the climate crisis is a “top shelf” priority for his government.

He emphasised the global effort needed to limit emissions and rising temperatures, but that governments and their people must get used to the fact that high temperatures are here to stay.

“We have to deal with that, and secure the lives of our citizens. We are going to have fires, we are going to have floods… and we have to deal with what is happening.

“I think nowadays everybody understands that. We should provide for our societies, we should be organised, and aim into the future and be proactive.”

He said that the temperatures in Athens were high for the time of year and that a lot of work had gone on across government to avoid a public health crisis and too much impact on economic productivity.

He was particularly worried, he said, about the threat of wildfires when the wind picks up in a few days’ time.

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