Alicante registers hottest January day since 1858
Saturday, January 30, 2021 @ 6:44 PM
AFTER suffering early-morning temperatures close to freezing in the first week or so of this month, Costa Blanca weather has gone completely to the opposite extreme: The mercury reached a peak yesterday (Friday) in the city of Alicante not seen in 163 years.
Alicante's most popular urban beach, El Postiguet, shown in August 2020. Although Friday, January 29 was not quite as hot as a typical August day, it was not far off it and felt almost like summer (photo: Alicante tourism board)
It beat the temperature recorded 39 years ago – in 1982 – on January 7 which, at 29.2ºC, joined this Thursday (January 28) as the second-warmest day in the first month of the year in history.
Soaring to 29.8ºC, yesterday's figure made it the hottest January day since records in the metropolitan area began being taken in the year 1858.
Faculty head of the Climatology Laboratory at Alicante University Jorge Olcina – who is also chairman of the Spanish Geographers' Association – said Friday broke all records for the city for January.
Prior to the 1982 figure – which set a record unbroken until now – the hottest January days in Alicante had not even happened in the last century, and even then, were several degrees lower.
Thermometers shot up to 26.8ºC on January 25, 1865 and again on January 15, 1868, and since then but before 1982, the warmest it had ever reached was 26.4ºC, on January 13, 1881.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com