Extreme heat, record fires and an overheated Mediterranean: Spain is trapped in the climate emergency

After a summer with very high temperatures and virulent fires, the rains are now worrying scientists.

The summer that ends this Sunday – the meteorological one, because the astronomical summer lasts until September 22 – closes another tragic chapter of the climate emergency in which Spain is trapped and which, crisis after crisis, has settled in our lives. The extreme temperatures of this summer have contributed to a brutal wave of fires that, in addition to killing eight people who were fighting the flames and damaging the economy of many towns and the habitats of hundreds of species, threatens to pulverize the fire records of the last three decades. The fires have already affected around 400,000 hectares, according to the provisional perimeter calculated by the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), under the European environmental monitoring programme Copernicus. Although these are estimates, preliminary data suggest that 2025 will exceed 2022 in terms of affected area, which in turn had been the worst year for fires since the mid-nineties of the last century. And what do 2022 and 2025 have in common? That its summers have been “extremely hot”, according to the records of the measuring stations of the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet). Both are virtually tied and are, in fact, the hottest summers in Spain since at least 1961, when the historical series of Aemet began.

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