AFP, published Monday, June 26, 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
According to the weather agency (Aemet), which has put several regions on alert, Spain is facing the first heat wave of the summer. On Monday, temperatures in the south of the country were over 44 degrees.
According to Aemet, this heat wave, which began on Sunday, has seen the thermometer rise above 38 degrees in Madrid and above 44.4 degrees in El Granado, Andalusia (south-west).
On Sunday, the mercury temperature had already reached 43.8 degrees in this municipality, near the border with Portugal, according to the weather agency, which predicts temperatures will return to more bearable levels by mid-week.
In Seville (south-west), where the thermometer reached 42.9 degrees on Monday, rising temperatures forced many workers to change their working hours to avoid heat stroke.
“We normally work from 8am to 3:30pm, but we have changed that from 7am to 2:30pm,” Miguel Angel, a construction worker, told AFPTV that extreme heat is worrisome.
“Three years ago I had four sunstrokes” at work, “heat strokes that knocked me out. I’m very careful today,” he explained.
The rising temperatures have prompted the authorities to activate their anti-heat plans, which identify the different levels of risk to the population and allow adjustment of school schedules and outdoor work.
In 2022, several workers had died at their workplace in Spain due to extreme temperatures. These deaths had prompted authorities to tighten protections for workers and ban work during the hottest hours.
– Longer summers –
Spain, a country at the forefront of global warming in Europe, is used to extreme temperatures, particularly in the south, but has faced a multiplication and intensification of heat waves in recent years, according to scientists.
“In the last ten years, the frequency of these hot spells has tripled compared to previous years. This goes hand in hand with the lengthening of the (meteorological) summer by about 10 days per decade since the 1980s,” pointed out Ruben del Campo, spokesman for Aemet.
Already at the end of April, a mass of hot, dry air from North Africa on mainland Spain had reached an all-time high of 38.8 degrees for the month of April, a level worthy of the month of July.
This phenomenon “would have been almost impossible without climate change,” according to a study published a few days later by the World Weather Attribution (WWA).
More broadly, Europe experienced a 2022 that was 2.3 degrees warmer than the climate at the end of the 19th century, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced last week, confirming the continent is overheating twice as fast the world average, resulting in heat waves and exceptional droughts.