SPAIN is heading for its first scorcher weekend of the year as a brutal front of hot air moves up over the peninsula from Africa.
State weather agency AEMET has launched emergency weather alerts for Friday and the weekend as a record-breaking high-pressure ridge locks extreme heat over Andalucia and the Costa Blanca.
Maximum temperatures will rocket up to 15C above the seasonal average over the next seven days, marking a blistering and lightning-fast transition from an unusually cool start to May.
For expat hotspots along the Costa del Sol and Valencia Community, the weekend heat will feel like the height of summer, with temperatures predicted to reach mid-summer highs of between 30C and 38C.
The most extreme heat is expected to concentrate across southwestern Spain, prompting AEMET to place parts of Extremadura on warning for temperatures hitting 38C.
Compounding the misery for weekend residents, the eastern edge of this massive ‘heat dome’ is sucking up a significant wave of Saharan dust, according to the experts to Meteored.
This airborne mud and calima will sweep from Canarias across the mainland, threatening to coat cars, villas, and private swimming pools in layers of red dust.
While meteorologists state the phenomenon does not technically qualify as an official ‘heatwave’ in mainland Spain due to strict legal definitions based on July and August historical thresholds, health authorities have warned vulnerable expats to take immediate precautions against heatstroke due to the sudden spike in temperature.
Worse is to come for coastal communities, as this weekend’s emergency heat dome marks the starting gun for what experts predict will be a punishingly long summer.
AEMET’s newly released seasonal consensus forecast for May, June, and July reveals a ‘very high probability’ that average temperatures across the entire country will remain in the highest historical brackets compared to the 1991–2020 reference period.
The extreme heat anomaly will be most severe and pronounced across the Mediterranean coast — including the Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca — and The Balearics.
AEMET has confirmed there is no sign of rainy relief on the horizon for the driest areas, less of a concern on the back of record reservoir levels.
While northeast Spain including Barcelona and The Balearics could see some wetter-than-average anomalies, the rest of Spain, including Andalucia, is locked into standard, bone-dry climatological trends.
Expats are being urged to prepare for an early spike in electricity bills as air conditioning units are switched on weeks ahead of schedule to combat the lasting heat.
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