It’s no secret that every year the summers seem to get a little hotter but now it’s official. Data shows that this week Barcelona recorded its highest temperature since the outbreak of World War I. The heatwave shows no sign of cooling. Eugene Costello reports…
Summers in Valencia are somewhat unbearable. High temperatures, little breeze and even the seawater is more akin to a warm bath. I bumped into my neighbour yesterday, Fina, a lady of advanced years. “Díos mío,” she exclaimed, coming in from the baking streets. “El calor, es fatal!” She, like many Valencians, was planning to leave the city for the entire month of August. In her case to go to stay near the coast at Perelló “para las brisas“. My last landlady does the same thing every summer, decamping to a chalet in El Puig.
But for many of us, we do not have the option of escaping the city’s heat. We have to struggle through, showering twice a day and sitting by free-standing fans or keeping the A/C on. It’s not just Valencia. On Tuesday the mercury in Barcelona hit 40°C. It is a record last seen in 1914, 110 years ago, when official records began in the city. Carles Nerín, a member of the Observatorio Fabra, told Spanish state broadcaster RTVE : “This temperature hasn’t been recorded in 110 years, so we have broken the absolute record.”
The return of wild fires
Spain’s weather agency AEMET declared large swathes of the eastern half of the country in extreme risk of wildfires on Wednesday (July 31). The third heatwave of the summer was set to peak and firefighters battled blazes overnight in the provinces of Cuenca and Alicante.
The whole country is turning red on heat maps. The scale of the problem is clear above in a heat map from the European Union, using Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite imagery above. Andalucia is “scorchio”, with highs of 42 degrees in the provinces of Granada and Jaén. Aragon is also on orange alert, with temperatures ranging between 37 and 39 degrees in the Ebro Riverbank, Bajo Aragón, Pyrenees, Cinco Villas, and southern Huesca.
Meteorologist Algons Puertas, from the Observatorio Fabra, posted on Twitter/X: “Finally today we had a new absolute maximum temperature record in the #obsFabra with 40.0C in manual station for the whole climate series 1914-2024. The 39.8C of July 1982 has been surpassed.”
If you moved to Valencia from northern Europe – the UK, Holland/Belgium, Scandinavia and so on – now might be a good time for a trip back for a few weeks to see friends and relatives…