In recent days across parts of Europe, temperatures have soared, heat records have been broken and spring has felt more like the height of summer. Météo France, the French national weather service, has attributed this to a “heat dome”, with warmth held in place by a high-pressure weather front that has produced temperatures more than 10C above what used to be usual for this time of year.
Human-caused climate breakdown is supercharging extreme weather around the world, driving deadly extremes that can strike at abnormal times in unusual places and claim lives.
Guardian reporters in five European capitals spoke to tourists and locals about how they have experienced this most recent period of unseasonable May heat, and their worries about what the climate emergency might mean for the future.
Madrid, Spain
The swifts hurling themselves through the almost cloudless sky over Madrid’s Plaza Mayor on Tuesday appeared to be the only living things immune to the unseasonably high temperatures. Beneath them, tour groups moved sluggishly through the square, waiters fidgeted around freshly laid tables and caricature artists sat listlessly in front of their easels.
Jim, a visitor from Sydney, spoke for the majority of his fellow tourists when asked how he and his wife, Marina, were dealing with the May heatwave. “These are not at all the temperatures we were expecting,” he said. “We brought clothes for cooler weather because that’s what we were expecting.”
Marina nodded: “Lots of layers.” Although the couple are used to the heat back in Australia, they had been surprised by its European ferocity.
Paula and Jonathan Diamond, from Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, had come to Madrid to visit their daughter. With the temperature in the Spanish capital approaching 30C (86F), they had decided against a hike with their children and instead were keeping to the shade of the plaza’s arcades.
All things considered, they were glad to be in Spain rather than England, where the temperatures were a few degrees higher. “It’s better than being at home because the hotel here has air con,” Paula said.
The prospect of air-conditioned room would have been deliciously tempting for Fabricio Deza, who stood in the centre of the plaza buried beneath the layers of a King Kong costume topped off by a Real Madrid strip, waiting for tourists to pay to have a photo taken with him.
“It’s not that bad today,” said the 23-year-old Peruvian. “It’s much, much worse in summer.” He said the trick to surviving the heat was to drink 3 litres of water a day and head for cover when it all got too much.
In the furnace surroundings of the Puerta del Sol, Juanjo Ayuso sat perched on a stool under a small parasol selling lottery tickets, as he has for decades.
“I’m here 10 hours a day,” he said. “You can drink water and splash your face with it but the heat just never stops. And it seems to be coming earlier and earlier each year.”
Words by Sam Jones
Paris, France
“The heat is terrifying,” said Darcey, 21, of experiencing the heatwave inside her tiny, top-floor apartment in Paris. “It can feel so hot you’re almost scared to go outside and it’s sweltering being under the roof.”
The psychology and neuroscience student said she had come to Place des Vosges in Paris’s historic Marais district because it was well known as a stretch of city grass where you could sit in a swimsuit and not be bothered or frowned upon.
Originally from London, she had spent much of the afternoon largely standing in one of the square’s fountains near the historic home of the writer Victor Hugo. “It’s easier to be outside,” she said, worried about the soaring temperatures.
Her friend Gabby, an environmental geography student, was visiting from the UK. “I was at a festival in Bristol at the weekend that was unbearably hot,” she said. The irony was that they first met and became friends in the snow of the Swiss mountains when working as ski instructors.
Across the park, under the chestnut trees, Barbara, 34, a radiologist from Minas Gerais in Brazil, was cooling her baby’s feet under a drinking fountain.
“It’s our first ever trip together as a family – we thought we would be coming in springtime, a friend was here the week before and said it was 15 to 17 degrees,” she said.
Travelling with her husband, her mother and her one-year-old daughter, they had come to the park for some shade and water. They still planned a picnic this week in view of the Eiffel Tower but would go very early in the morning. She felt it was a very dry heat. “It does make you think of the planet’s future,” she said.
Not far away, a group of high school students were eating sandwiches on the grass two weeks before their final baccalaureate exams. “We can’t sleep at night, it’s hard to study and there are no air conditioners or fans at school. It’s pretty hard,” said one 17-year-old.
Solène, a Paris tour guide with 12 years’ experience, was guiding a retired couple from Chicago through the shaded parts of the city. “Because I know Paris’s efforts at planting and cooling down certain areas, I’m adapting my tours,” she said. “The worst is the stretch between the Louvre and the Opéra Garnier. In the 19th century, Charles Garnier said he wanted no trees obscuring the views towards the Louvre. He didn’t know what the future held in store in terms of temperature.”
Angelique Chrisafis
London, UK
When Cameron and Autumn, a couple from New Jersey, came to London last week, there were highs of 14C. By Tuesday the temperature had more than doubled, reaching 34C as they stood in the scorching midday heat outside Buckingham Palace.
“We knew it was going to start off cold-ish, but each day as we were checking the forecast, the degrees kept going up and up,” said Autumn, a 19-year-old musician. She said the weather was “shocking”.
Her boyfriend, Cameron, 20, was in London for the heatwaves of 2022 and believes “we’ll have another one of those soon enough”. “I mean, it’s getting hotter, and it’s not stopping,” he said. “It’s like every single year, England breaks a new heat record – that’s not normal.”
A family visiting the palace from Exeter didn’t dare approach the front entrance, which was completely exposed to the sun, and looked at it from the shady tree line nearby. They had not anticipated the weather being this hot.
“It’s half-term, so we thought it was an ideal time to come, but no – if we could’ve rescheduled, we would’ve. We would never choose to travel in this weather,” said Deborah, a vicar. Her husband, Ash, said: “We’d probably be at the beach in Devon.”
Winnie and David, designers from Sydney, are used to more extreme temperatures than this but felt that London wasn’t equipped to support tourists walking around the city.
“There’s not enough shops, basically. You can’t get water or anything. The bathrooms are a problem too,” Winnie said. “In winter it should be fine, but for summer it’s really bad.”
Isaaq Tomkins
Dublin, Ireland
Manal Yousseff, 40, had come from Egypt this week prepared for Irish weather – rain gear, winter coat, warm hat – but discovered that Ireland’s weather was not as advertised.
“I didn’t bring any summer clothes. I expected it to be windy and wet. I didn’t expect this,” she said, indicating at swimmers and sunbathers at the Dún Laoghaire baths in south Dublin. “It’s amazing.”
Her husband, Dash Abdelaal, 41, who lives in Dublin, said he worried about the climate crisis but appreciated azure skies. “In Ireland we don’t see that so often. It’s usually grey and cloudy.”
Miguel Avendano, 47, a language student from Mexico, savoured the warmth – Tuesday set a new Irish temperature record for May, 29.7C, a day after the previous record – but said he would have been OK with cold and rain. “I can’t control the climate so I accept it.”
Mohit Bhandari, 40, a taxi driver from England, said two years in Ireland had accustomed him to windier, wetter weather. “This is a lovely surprise. Instead of being indoors, you can come out and have nice cup of tea.”
The balminess had prompted Jack Jones, 74, a retired public servant from north Dublin, to make a day trip to Dún Laoghaire. “Climate change is here but this sunshine sure beats the rain,” he said.
At the Forty Foot in Sandycove, Irish and Brazilian youths took turns diving into waters that James Joyce, in Ulysses, had described as “scrotumtightening”.
Rory Carroll
Berlin, Germany
“We don’t associate Berlin with heat,” said Maria-Jose Gomez, 29, a Peruvian citizen who had met friends on Tuesday in front of the Strandbad Wannsee, a large open-air lido with a long sandy beach, in the German capital’s westernmost suburb. “We were pleasantly surprised to find out that the city has got its own beach, which is great for the current conditions.”
Daniel Sanz, 30, also from Lima, Peru, and Ana Victoria Acevedo, 22, from Mexico City, agreed. “We’re used to these sorts of temperatures,” said Sanz, as temperatures in Berlin soared to about 30C. “But we’re also used to everywhere being kitted out with air con, which Berlin is just not. I suppose they will have to adjust accordingly as the temperatures keep getting warmer.”
“At the same time we’re also concerned about climate change,” Acevedo added. “We must do something to try to reverse it, otherwise potentially the next years won’t be about fun times on the beach, but will be increasingly intolerable.”
Germany was only on the fringes of the heat dome encasing parts of Europe, but many Berliners and visitors still headed to Wannsee to seek relief from the unseasonable warmth.
For €6.50 (£5,62, $7.56), bathers can choose either the regular beach, and sit in a “beach basket” chair or under an umbrella, or the smaller stretch reserved for naturists. Both were teeming on Tuesday.
“Yesterday evening I slept with the windows open and it was a bit uncomfortable,” said Selina, 17, who was at the lido with her friend Betül. “Today we decided to come here and cool down.”
Her summer holidays were often spent in Kuşadası, on Turkey’s western Aegean coast, “and there it’s only 28 degrees today”, she said. Betül’s family is from Mersin, in southern Turkey, “where it’s only 26 degrees”, she said. “We closed our eyes earlier today as we lay on our towels on the sand and thought: ‘We could be in Turkey right now.’”
Annet, 29, who works for a major social media platform in Berlin, and Forum, 25, who is a bar trainer in a Berlin restaurant, said that coming from India they were only too aware of the chaos the climate emergency could cause. “It makes you uneasy wherever you are, as it’s kind of changing every year, and it’s often unpredictable and depends on where you are as to what the knock-on effect of those conditions will be,” Annet said.
Kate Connolly