Turkey's forest fires in perspective.

Indeed a period of very hot weather with low humidity caused the forests to be both very dry, the sunshine particularly strong, allowed many fires to start and the sea breezes of some of the coastal areas caused the fires to spread quickly, sadly causing the deaths of 8 persons.

Fortunately, all fires are now under control and 99% have been extinguished and cooled.

With a landmass of 783,000 Km2, twice the size of Germany, and with approximately 28% of the land covered by forest, fires are an annual occurrence, so the Turkish State is very experienced in dealing with them and is, generally very efficient in fighting fires.

What made the headlines this year is that many of the fires were close to the well-known resort towns of Bodrum and Marmaris, making for exciting news reports.

The amount of damaged forest is as follows:

In Antalya's Manavgat county 30,000 hectares, In Muğla's Bodrum county 12,600 hectares, In Mugla's Marmaris county 8000 hectare Antalya's Alanya county Güzelbağ area 6500hektares of pine forest have been damaged or destroyed.

A total of 57,000 hectares burned of Turkey's 21,678.134 hectares of forest is 0.2629%, or 0.0727% of Turkey's 78,356.200 hectares of land. Statistically not huge fires, and very far from the headlines we see in the western press about 'Turkey Devastated by Fire'. It is just not true.

As none of these fires were anywhere near any of the places we visit on our tours, your programme will be unaffected and you will face no loss of enjoyment of visiting our vast and beautiful country.