Popular Italian airport reopens after closing for several hours because of wildfires

AN airport in a popular Italian holiday resort was forced to close for several hours earlier due to fires burning dangerously close to its runways.

It follows a number of wildfires across Greece which have seen thousands of tourists and locals evacuated.

Wildfires also raged around Palermo Airport in Sicily on Tuesday morning after the region suffered a sustained period of heatwave conditions.

The airport eventually announced that it had reopened shortly before 11am, although it was only operating a limited departure service.

The travel hub in the Sicilian capital was forced to shut until 11am local time, its operator said on Twitter, as firefighters worked to put out a major blaze.

Several flights in and out of the airport were cancelled as a result, with Euronews reporting that more than 70 wildfires had broken out in the region in the last 24 hours.

Other flights were rerouted to Trapani Airport, while some were simply delayed until further notice.

The airport's operators tweeted: "The airport in Palermo has reopened.

"At the moment only a limited number of departing flights will be allowed. For arrivals, weather conditions are being monitored."

The incident added to Sicily's travel misery at the peak of the tourist season.

The island's main airport of Catania, Italy's fifth-biggest, was closed last week due to a fire in a terminal building and has reopened only for a few flights.

UK airlines are having to reroute their flights to other airports in the region, while Jet2 have cancelled all routes to and from Catania until next month.

Catania's Vincenzo Bellini Airport has both inbound and outbound flights to a total of 91 destinations and 100,000s passengers are expected to be hit by the cancellations altogether.

The disruption is the result of a fire that broke out in Terminal A last Sunday night, in which no one was injured and the cause of which remains unknown.

The airport reopened on Monday (July 24) but still has limited access, with only four flights permitted to land per hour until tomorrow.

The latest fires come as a heatwave has hit southern Europe.

In some parts of eastern Sicily, temperatures rose to 47.6C on Monday with 16 cities put on red alert in Italy.

These include Palermo and Catania, where power and water supply cuts that local officials blamed in part on the heat have been frequent in recent days.

And wildfires across Rhodes have left thousands of Brits stranded abroad.

More than 19,000 people have been evacuated with Jet2, TUI and Thomas Cook cancelling flights and holiday packages.

Wildfires have also spread across the island of Corfu, along with Agioi Theodoroi and parts of Evia.

Here's how to get refunds if your flight is grounded.