Actually I don't mind the sun at all. Here in Alicante province it always gets warm in July and August and the lower temperatures of May, June and September would still be a glorious British summer. In my opinion it's one of the delights of living here but Britons, Spaniards and probably Burundians seem to be constantly surprised that it's warm and several complain about it. True enough it can be destructive and it's not good when it's always sunny and it never rains and the reservoirs empty and the word drought is everywhere.
There's often a breeze in Culebrón, it can be a stiff breeze. We get those dust devils passing by quite frequently in summer - mini tornadoes. Suddenly a breeze springs up from nowhere, slams all the open doors shut, makes the windows rattle, sends dust everywhere and then is gone. But when it does blow it really blows. It actually quite scares me. We have some tall trees. I watch them creak in the wind and I wonder whether the roof would be strong enough to survive a tree toppling onto it.
I don't like the hail either. We get a fair bit of hail. It's something to do with hot air meeting cold air maybe with the sea temperature playing some part in that. I did read it up once but I'm old and I forget and I'm lazy so I'm not going to look again. Sometimes the hailstones are enormous and a few hundred grammes of ice doing 100 kph can do a fair bit of damage to the garden furniture that has survived the sun. And cars. And rooves. A child died this summer from a hailstone strike.
All of these phenomena get reported on the news and nowadays, because someone is always pointing their mobile phone at the right place at the right time, there are videos of tennis ball sized hailstones bouncing off cars, lightning flashes hitting football players and skyscrapers alike and of cars slip sliding in the snow. One of the staples though is floods. Spain has the sort of floods where it rains and rains and rivers overflow and places are flooded and Civil Protection launch rubber boats in the High Street. Much more frequently though we have floods where it rains for ten minutes depositing thousand and thousands of litres in no time at all so that drains can't cope, streets become rivers, stairs and rooves become waterfalls and cars float alongside skips down towards the sea. It looks spectacular on the news. You watch as the water comes gushing out of the windows of somebody's house or as cars float until they pile onto each other. Often a flood that affects one village will be light rain in one a few kilometres away. Microclimates in Spain are as common as tortilla de patatas.
Now we can be pretty smug about this. Those sort of floods are often to do with covering the land with tarmac and concrete. We live surrounded by soil. The road to our house is made of compacted earth. We're on a slope that seems to naturally guide the torrents past our land. Nonetheless the rain can cause problems. It finds the holes in the tin roof of the garage, it comes down the chimneys for the water heater or the cooker hood, it comes under the doors and if you've left a window open then mopping comes next - I lost a computer because the water came in through the open window. But there's a lot of difference between that and people squeegeeing 15cms of mud from their living room floor which is what we see on the telly time after time.
Yesterday we had a bit of a downpour. It lasted maybe 10 minutes. The rain took no notice of the metre overhang of the roof and the 30cm deep window casement and blew into the office so that Maggie had to retreat with her computer. I saw that the back patio was filling with water. I clean the drain every two weeks to make sure it's clear of leaves and stuff but the drain wasn't big enough and the water was soon 15cms deep and threatening to lap over steps and into rooms. I paddled out, took off the drain cover and the fight between water in and out became more equal. It took me a while to dry off though and opening the door to go out was enough to mean a fair bit of mopping up. Then the electric tripped. It turned out to be that the water blowing down the tube for the cooker hood had shorted the circuit. It's still wet enough to still be tripping (same word, different meaning) 24 hours later. But today the sun is shining so it will soon be dry.
And at t least I won't need to water the plants today.
The photo is from Pinoso but years ago. The video isn't from here. It's from all over Spain but it does give the idea.
