‘It’s terrifying’: Spain braces for worst of heatwave

For Kinvara Vaughan, the prospect of record temperatures hitting the Mediterranean from Tuesday fills her with dread.

“I saw the headline: heat storm heading for Europe this week. It is terrifying. We are doing a spectacular job destroying the planet,” she says from her home in Marbella, southern Spain.

Parts of southern Europe could hit its hottest ever temperature on Italy’s islands of Sicily and Sardinia, where a high of 48C (118F) is predicted, according to the European Space Agency. Spain's Aemet weather agency said the heatwave this week “will affect a large part of the countries bordering the Mediterranean” with temperatures in some southern areas of Spain exceeding 42C, according to the World Meteorological Organisation

The power of the sun is very real for Vaughan, given a discovery by her doctors earlier this year. “They discovered three moles with stage one melanoma, and they could treat them. They said that I would not need chemotherapy. It was a shock as I had not been for a check-up for over three years. I was so lucky,” the 47-year-old half-British, half-Canadian equestrian centre manager tells The Independent.

On Gill Allan's balcony at her home in the southern Andalusian hills, even in the shade the thermometer hits 32C. After a quick early morning walk with her dog Bozo, she is not going outside in the baking heat for the rest of the day.

Like millions of others across southern Europe, she was struggling to cope with the soaring heat as a second heatwave scorches Spain, Italy and Greece. Sometimes literally. Greek authorities issued evacuation orders for at least six seaside communities on Monday as wildfires threatened holiday homes near Athens. Water-dropping planes and helicopters tackled the flames near Lagonisi, some 25 miles (40 kilometres) southeast of the capital, in an area with thousands of such homes. The fire service reported a second large wildfire in a wooded area near the resort town of Loutraki, some 50 miles west of Athens. Back in Spain, a wildfire that started on Saturday on the Canary island of La Palma – and sparked the evacuation of 4,000 people – continued to burn on Monday, although weaker winds and cooler temperatures in the area are helping firefighters combat it.

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Allan, a retired estate agent from Rochdale, Lancashire, who has lived in Spain for nearly 20 years, says her village of Yunquera in the hills near Ronda, was cooled by a mountain breeze.

“If you get out of the intense heat it is still tough and you have to stay in the shade most of the day, but we are lucky because we have a bit of breeze,” she says, adding that places like Coín, a town near Malaga towards the coast in Andalusia, have a higher level of humidity which makes the heat tougher to bear.

“When I come down to places like Coín, it is as if I didn’t dry myself when I came out of the shower. I sweat so much,” said Allan.

Bozo, her Spanish water dog, also has to “wait until 8 or 9 o'clock at night” for another walk “because the heat in the road is too hot for his paws”.

Ana Sánchez is at the chemist in her hometown of Seville, which is nicknamed the “oven of Spain” for good reason. As temperatures in the southern Spanish city hit 42C on Monday, Sánchez is buying medicine to combat one of the hazards of the heatwave – summer colds.

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“You go from the baking streets into these shopping centres where the air conditioning is turned up high and you get a cold,” she says.

Sanchez, 69, a retired teacher, believes the heatwave emphasises social divisions in southern European nations. “There are those who can afford to have air conditioning all day long and who do not suffer from the heat and those who cannot because of the price of electricity. These people can only afford a fan or maybe not that, so they suffer more when it is hot,” she says. “Similarly, they will not be able to get away to the seaside to escape the worst of the heat.”

Like most Sevillanos she is accustomed to baking temperatures in the summer months. “You must adapt. You don’t go out after 12pm and only come out again after 7pm. You must drink a lot of water and thankfully, recently they brought in a law which banned physical work in extreme heat,” Sanchez explains.

Lourdes Palacios, 34, a journalist who lives in Seville, said most people were accustomed to the summer heat but it did not make it any easier. “Some villages outside Seville are even hotter than here. They are known as the frying pan of Spain,” she says. “We just stay in all day, drink lots, put the air conditioning on and try not to do too much.”

She adds that she was not too worried about the rising temperatures, but the prolonged drought in Spain is also a concern.

“There are restrictions in some of the small villages outside Seville with the water turned off at night. In the city, people were not permitted to refill their private swimming pools. There seems to be no let up and it is just getting drier,” she says.