An Irishman melting in Spain: Life in a 40°C city is no joke

THIS WEEK IN Madrid, temperatures hit 40 degrees, and the city has effectively shut down.

Far away from any coastal breeze, Madrid bakes in the first official heatwave on record for this year, accompanied by a palpable fear that this will not be the last one to hit the capital this summer.

I’ve lived here for over 10 years now, and anytime I tell someone back in Ireland how long I’ve been here, I’m nearly always met with the same response: “The weather must be lovely. We could do with a bit more of that here — the rain never seems to stop these days.”

While there is no denying that Spain is a sunny country, Madrid alone records almost 3,000 hours of sunshine annually, more than double that of Dublin. I’d urge caution at the thought that life here is something akin to a holiday postcard, defined by golden sandy beaches, cool ocean breezes and warm summer sunshine.

Madrid is landlocked, sitting on a high plateau in the centre of the country. There is no sea to take the edge off the heat here; instead, you are surrounded by kilometres of granite, brick and asphalt that soak up the heat and hold onto it.

So, what is it like to live in a city when it’s 40 degrees?

Honestly, it just feels like you’re trapped inside a hot oven with no way to escape. The moment you step outside, the air feels heavy and completely dried out, like a thick blanket of heat. If a breeze picks up, it doesn’t cool you down at all; warm air is pushed against your face as if you were walking directly into a hairdryer.

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You find yourself navigating the city by its shadows, sticking close to the walls of buildings to get to where you’re going while trying to avoid the water dripping from the air conditioning units of the flats above.

The pavement and walls trap the heat and radiate it back at you like a storage heater, and the air grows hazy with dust and dirt kicked up from the baked streets.

Everything you wear sticks to you. People desperately fan themselves on buses and trains to try and gain some small relief from the relentless conditions, with respite only coming in the form of a blast of cold air from a local supermarket as you duck inside to escape the glare.

From mid-morning to evening, the streets empty out as people shelter at home with the blinds pulled down, keeping their flats in darkness to try and trap whatever cool air remains.

Only the tourists are undeterred by the heat, determined to see the city’s sights no matter the temperature.

When the sun does eventually go down, nighttime offers little relief. “Tropical nights,” where temperatures refuse to fall below 25°C, mean sleepless, sweaty hours as the concrete and asphalt continue to radiate heat well into the morning. Everyone has their tricks to try and sleep, whether it’s placing frozen bottles of water in front of fans or taking cold showers before bed, but the exhaustion feels inescapable as night after night of poor sleep leaves you feeling drained and sluggish.

Europe’s heat dome future

But this is not just my experience, and it is not just Madrid.

The numbers tell a story that is hard to ignore. Over 181,000 people died from heat-related causes across European summers in 2022, 2023, and 2024 combined, according to research published in Nature Medicine — with climate change directly responsible for 68% of those deaths, having pushed temperatures up to 3.6°C above what they would otherwise have been.

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The European Climate Risk Assessment no longer frames this as a future threat; heat risk across Southern Europe is already classified as critical.

Meanwhile, last year’s EU wildfire season was the worst ever recorded, burning through nearly 1.08 million hectares across 25 member states, almost double the long-term average, with fires breaking out for the first time in countries like Germany and Slovakia, far beyond the Mediterranean regions we have come to associate with this kind of destruction.

So, while it may seem from the outside like an Irish person complaining about a bit of summer sun, the reality of living through this is something else entirely.

As I write this, the blinds in my flat are pulled shut against another scorching afternoon, a fan pushing warm air around a room that hasn’t properly cooled down in days.

What is happening here in Madrid is not a novelty or a curiosity to be envied from a wet Irish summer; it is a warning.

The summers are getting longer, the heat is getting more dangerous, and the window to treat this as someone else’s problem is closing faster than any of us would like to admit.

Cormac Breen is an English language teacher and writer living in Madrid, Spain.

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