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Spain’s diverse landscape, and the interference from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, coughs up the most varied climate in Europe. The meseta, Madrid included within its realm, delivers a continental climate of cold winters and baking summers, both of which are pretty dry.
The Pyrenees and the northern coastal regions are cooler and take the lion’s share of Spain’s rain from weather systems rolling in off the Atlantic. In the South, Andalusia can be jovially warm throughout the winter but aggressively hot in summer. Along the Mediterranean coast the climate is generally dry, mild in winter and often hot and humid in summer. Many of the sierras retain snow on their highest peaks throughout the year.
The flow of Spanish life has long been guided by the weather, the most obvious example being the daily siesta. While not as widespread as of old, the early afternoon nap can still be a necessary response to the torpor-inducing heat of summer.
Climate Change
A European Environment Agency report of 2004 suggested that the Iberian Peninsula will suffer most among the EU regions from the onset of climate change. Summers are already getting drier and hotter (2005 brought the worst drought in 60 years) and storms more severe, while glaciers on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees have shrunk by as much as 50% in the last two decades. Climate change may also further accelerate the serious desertification caused by overgrazing and mass tourism along Spain’s south-eastern coast. UN figures suggest that over 30% of Spain is in danger of becoming desert.
Windy Culture
In Catalonia they brace themselves against the tramontana, a face-slapping northerly that also lends its name to a mountain chain on Majorca. Salvador Dalí painted the Christ of the Tramontana (1968) as part of a collaboration with Catalan poet Carles Fages de Climent, while Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez penned Tramontana (1993), a short story in which the main character is pushed to suicide by the tormenting wind - an apparent regular occurrence in Catalan days of yore.
Not to be left out, southern Spain fears the periodic wrath of the leveche, a sirocco (hot and dusty) wind that sweeps up from the Sahara and blasts the coastline with dust and stifling heat. The solano is an even hotter wind that blows through the Andalusian Plain in summer, baking everything in its path.
