Life in Culebrón

I've mentioned before that the weather in Spain can be quite extreme. Sun, wind and rain can all be just a tad on the over the top side. 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 bl...

Pinoso has a weather station that forms a part of the AEMET network. AEMET is the Spanish Met Office, Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. So far as I know the weather station for AEMET is in the centre of Pinoso, at the Instituto José Marhuenda Prats. I think it's at the school because the bloke who started it all up taught there though that may be wrong. The man is real enough though, Agapito - always called Cápito - Gonzálvez. He's been Mr Weather in Pinoso for over 30 years now.  If you haven't seen the AEMET site this link  should go directly to the observations over the past few days. Click around the site and you'll find forecasts and a whole lot more. There is another weather station out at Rodriguillo, which was damaged when the reed beds there went on fire in the summer. Capito got it up and running again within 8 days. There's another another on the Yecla road out of Pinoso. These two stations log their recordings on the Valencian Meteorological Association w...

It's raining in Culebrón. This is unusual. It's not unusual in the North of Spain, it rains a lot there, but here in sunny Alicante, well, it's usually sunny.  It does rain of course. A quick check on a couple of past years and we seem to get about 50 rainy days a year. But that means any rain. The number of days when it rains and rains are few and far between. It's raining now though and it has been for a couple of days. Fortunately, for the local farmers, it's not torrential and there's no hail. Hail is a remarkably common component of the infrequent but heavy storms we get. The number of dimpled cars is testament to that. Big blighters. Balls of ice cracking and smashing down on things. There's thunder and lightning too. The sky alight with lightning is pretty common but the fireworks don't always lead to a downpour. Rain, like everything else in our neck of the woods is very localised. It can be pouring down in Paredón, drizzling in Ubeda...

I've written a diary every day for the last forty six years. For several years now I've put a little footnote to describe the weather - hot and sunny, wet and grey - and, alongside, the maximum and minimum temperatures. I bought a thermometer for the process but, when I lived in La Unión, there was nowhere I could site the thermometer in the shade so I started to use the data from the Spanish equivalent of the Met Office. The weather, here as everywhere, is a talking point. It's been hot for the past two or three weeks generally in the mid to high thirties. Some parts of Spain have been over forty on occasional days. People often exagerate the weather. They tell me that it was 53ºC in their patio or somesuch so I try to slip into the conversation, gently of course - well, the highest temperature ever recorded in Spain before today has been 47.2ºC in Murcia and, according to the local weather station it only got to 38ºC (or whatever). But local variations are very noti...