ANYONE who thinks living in Spain means permanent beach weather will be stunned to hear that the mercury dropped to levels typical of a Siberian winter over the last two nights, but it's not fake news: According to the met office, Tuesday night broke historic lowest-temperature records, and then Wednesday night smashed them yet again.
If you've seen this before any of your friends, you might want to take bets on what the numbers were – and you should definitely keep a note of it in case it's ever used as a tie-breaker in a pub quiz.
On Wednesday (January 6) at 05.19 in the morning, the weather station in Clot del Tuc de la Llança (pictured above) in the land-locked Catalunya province of Lleida, just on the edge of the Pyrénées, showed a temperature of -34.1ºC – breaking the record set in 1956, of -32ºC at the weather station of Estany-Gento in the same province.
By 05.30, it had warmed up a bit – the mercury was showing -33.9ºC, although residents probably decided to keep the heating on a little longer just in case.
Before Spain and the rest of the world had closed their mouths after a collective global jaw-dropping and picked themselves up off the floor, the mainland broke its own record yet again, having only just done so for the first time in nearly 65 years.
The weather station in Vega de Liordes in the province of León registered, at 07.06 on Thursday morning, a figure that would even be cold for Arctic Greenland in January: -35.6ºC.
Castilla y León is typically one of Spain's coldest regions in winter, and summers – although warm and pleasant – are far less sweltering than on the southern and Mediterranean coasts; winters in this centre-northern region are frequently very chilly and snow at ground-level is very common towards the end and beginning of the year, although even then, a hard winter might mean night temperatures of -10ºC, which would normally be considered newsworthy.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com