SPAIN has recorded its hottest summer since national weather records began in 1961, according to preliminary data.

Spain’s State Meteorological Agency, AEMET, put the season around 2.5C above the seasonal average nationwide — beating the previous record, which had only been set the year before, in 2025.

But Catalunya ran even hotter than the rest of the country.

Catalunya’s regional weather service, Meteocat, found temperatures running at least 3C above average across more than 80% of the region, with peaks of up to 4.5C in the western Pyrenees and the Vic plain, an inland area north of Barcelona.

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The season beat Catalunya’s previous hottest summers on record, 2022 and 2003, and left every one of the region’s 20 longest-running weather stations — several with more than a century of data behind them — logging their hottest summer ever measured.

Barcelona’s Fabra Observatory, whose records stretch back 113 years, hit 40.9C on July 8, a new all-time high for the city.

That mark beat the previous record of 40C, which had only been reached for the first time two years earlier, in 2024.

The city’s Can Bruixa monitoring station, in the Les Corts district, logged an unbearable 59 nights where the temperature never dropped below 25C.

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These are so-called torrid nights, when the heat never breaks enough for the body to properly cool down and recover, even after dark.

That is eight more than the previous record, set back in 2003.

Meanwhile, the sea followed the same pattern.

At L’Estartit, a Costa Brava resort town in Girona province, water temperatures reached 27.8C in mid-August, the warmest reading since local records began in 1974.

But that was nothing compared to buoys in Barcelona and Tarragona, which recorded 30.5C and 30.7C respectively on August 8.

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These record setting temperatures, nationally and in Catalunya alike, are becoming part of a pattern.

This summer’s records did not stand for long before being broken, with the previous benchmark in each case set only a handful of years ago rather than decades back.

Meteocat’s full seasonal report, with further detail on rainfall and storms, is due in October.

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