5 days or 5 weeks?

After hearing about the sweltering heatwaves in Europe, we knew that heading out to Spain on Sunday was going to be hot. As we got off the plane late in the evening, it didn’t feel too much different to summers before and after all, we were only here for five days so of course it would be bearable. Wouldn’t it? Last summer there had been forest fires in our town, so surely it wasn’t going to be more intense than that?

We drove the 25 minutes from Malaga airport up to our town (Alhaurin el Grande) with the windows down. How glorious to be able to do that after leaving a very cold, wet and miserable UK just a couple of hours earlier. It was as we opened the doors to the house though that we knew how hot it had been and would continue to be in the coming days. Stuffy doesn’t say enough. It was like walking into an oven. We had to open the back doors immediately to get some air inside. We also opened the fridge in the hope that we had left some nice cold cans in there from the last visit. We hadn’t. Instead we had to have a glass of warm water that was coming out of the cold tap. The water tanks on the roof were clearly being solar heated.

We don’t have aircon in our Spanish house. We don’t even have windows. As I’ve previously mentioned, there’s a lot of work to do! But we do have some fans and got them out immediately, plugging one in opposite the bed. It would need to be on all night. And all day.

The reason for the trip was to check in on the house. After a lot of building work last summer and a brand new bathroom being installed, that bathroom sprang a leak in the spring and we had water coming through the ceiling. Before we went to bed, we turned on the light in the damaged room to see that half of the ceiling was on the floor. We would have to deal with that in the morning.

Before we got to Spain, I had felt a bit disappointed that we were only going for five days this summer, when the past two years we had taken five weeks (I know, poor me…). But with the house in its current state, it didn’t take me long to recognise that in the Ceberus heat five days was probably going to be enough.

When I woke the next morning, I showered (a cold shower), got dressed, put my face cream on, and set up my laptop for the day. Minutes later my eyes started to sting as the face cream that I had just put on was melting down from my forehead into my eyes. I wiped it all off and sat back at my laptop that was pumping out very hot air. I lasted on the balcony (which, by the by, is in the shade) until about 10:30 when I had to move inside.

I drank glasses and glasses of water all day long. It was only as I finished my working day that I realized I hadn’t had a wee all day. I was drinking so much and just sweating it all out! When I did finally nip to the bathroom, as I washed my hands and used the liquid soap, I noticed that it was very warm, almost hot in fact. Even the soap couldn’t escape the heat!

It was too hot to sleep. We did to a fashion, but it was sweaty nights of tossing and turning, trying to position perfectly for maximum fan impact.

As the week went on, we did settle into it. We accepted defeat that we wouldn’t be able to do any work on the house. So we made sure that we enjoyed our mornings and evenings. The best time to enjoy a slight breeze was around 7:30am with a cuppa on the balcony, and the best time to go for a stroll (and a gelato!) was no earlier than 10pm. What was fascinating was how many people were out in the public spaces at that time. The parks and benches throughout the town were packed! Clearly the locals were adapting to the extreme heat this week too. We weren’t the only ones in an incredibly stuffy house.

Walking back, I felt that my toes, feet and ankles were swollen and my arms and legs covered in heat rash. Compared to others throughout the Mediterranean who have suffered loss of possessions through fire, heat stroke and even death from this heatwave, these are nothing. But the extreme heat of the past few days in Southern Spain has been very real. It does take its toll and has a real impact on your body.

As always, and even though it had been 40+ degrees, I was still sad to leave. We left not having done the jobs that we had wanted to. The ceiling is still down. I hadn’t seen enough colourful sunsets, I hadn’t had enough tostada. Five days in my favourite place didn’t feel like enough, but maybe with the heat as it currently is, five weeks would have been far too much. So this summer, as we left safe and sound, but with the same to-do list to take back next time, five days has been just about perfect.