“Don't melt yourself over here. Go in the shade and I'll call you back right away,” says a tour guide to a customer who has just arrived. It is midday on a July day with a high temperature alert and Madrid's Puerta del Sol is full of tourists and people passing through. The few who remain in the square are concentrated in the only strip of shade that can be found at that time of the day. But there are those who have no choice but to endure under the sun, like those who wrap themselves in doll costumes and wander around the center of the square until someone takes a picture with them. “It's very hot, but that's what we have to do. We have to bring home the bacon,” says the man in a bunny costume.
Although many are under the impression that this summer has been “cooler” than previous ones, this August has been the hottest in Spain since the records began and it doesn't look like the situation is going to improve in the near future. Climate projections foresee an increase in daily maximum temperatures in Spain of about 0.4 ºC per decade until 2050 and increasingly frequent and more severe heat waves, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
As the temperature rises, so will the consequent effects of heat on health, which range from poorer sleep queality to the risk of death. In the summer of 2023 alone, it is estimated that there were more than 2,800 deaths related to high temperatures, according to data from the Daily Mortality Monitoring System (MoMo) of the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII). Since MoMo records began in 2015, August 2023 has been the month with the second highest number of heat-related deaths after July 2022.
Measuring the actual number of heat-related deaths is complicated since most fatalities are not caused by heat stroke but because high temperatures aggravates pre-existing diseases. In fact, according to experts from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), the real number of heat-related deaths is probably being underestimated and the lack of homogeneous data regarding this phenomenon is widespread.
The problem of heat-related deaths is particularly striking southern European countries, including Spain, which had the fourth highest number of heat-related deaths per million inhabitants in 2023. That same year, Palencia was the Spanish province with the most deaths related to high temperatures per 100,000 inhabitants. In more populated provinces, such as Madrid and Barcelona, the death rate is lower. However, the Spanish capital concentrates the highest death toll, with almost twice as many deaths as the next province on this list.
The value of designing cities to mitigate the effects of extreme temperatures
In cities like Madrid, it is estimated that 4% of deaths from high temperatures in summer are due to the urban heat island phenomenon. This is the difference in temperature between an urban area and the surrounding rural areas, which can increase as much as 8ºC in the city due to the excess of asphalt and lack of trees. It is an example of the ability that urban design has to modify climatic conditions, making extreme temperature episodes more intense, just like heat islands. But the effect can also be the opposite, with urban design mitigating such episodes.
There is no single way to achieve this; options range from cooling rooftops to greening proyects. But there is one initiative that stands out because “if necessary, it can be implemented within a month,” says biologist and coordinator of urban adaptation to climate change at Greenpeace, Elvira Jiménez. In recent years, several cities around the world have begun to set up indoor and outdoor spaces where people can find thermal comfort in the face of extreme weather events such as heat waves. These are the so-called climate shelters.
It is unclear when the concept emerged, but in 2017 Paris launched a plan to enable shelters throughout the city and in Spain cities like Barcelona, Bilbao or Murcia are designing their own network of shelters. In Madrid the initiative is still waiting to be launched.
In 2022, the left-leaning political party Más Madrid took the proposal to the Government of the Community, but it was rejected with the votes of the right-wing parties (PP and Vox). Two years later, the Madrid City Council announced among its measures to protect the population from the heat this summer the use of cultural spaces as shelter. The proposal was criticized for including pay-to-access areas such as cinemas, although they applied discounts during the hottest hours.
In addition to being free of charge, experts point out that climate shelters must meet a series of requirements. “Now we're seeing citizens who are calling spaces that are cooler but don't have drinking water or places to sit down a climate shelter. It's not enough having a more pleasant temperature than in the street to be considered a climate shelter,” warns Ana Terra, a researcher specializing in urban adaptation to climate change at the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3).
After that initiative from the Madrid Council, in June 2024 the center-left and left leaning parties PSOE and Más Madrid brought to the City Council a new proposal for a network of climate shelter in the capital. Again, it was rejected with the votes of PP and Vox. A month after this rejection, a list of possible climate shelters was published in the Madrid’s Official Bulletin as part of the new heat wave protocol, CalorMad. The list is of “informative character” featuring the “facilities distributed in the different districts that could be used as climate shelters”.
Of the 282 shelters proposed by the City Council, most would be centers for the elderly (66) or cultural (59) and sports centers (41). The availability would be total in almost all of them, in other words, at any time the center is open for the public it would be available for citizens to seek protection from the heat, although the opening hours vary. In addition, they would be located mainly in the outer districts of the M-30, Madrid’s inner ring road which delimitates the outskirts of the city, with Ciudad Lineal as the neighborhood with the most available centers (32), as Maldita.es has analyzed. In the following table you can find the data of each space.
In September 2024, the centers have not yet begun to operate as climate shelters and although some knew about the CalorMad plan, they did not know that the official list was already published, as Maldita.es has verified by asking some of the establishments. While they may or may not start to operate, there are those who have chosen not to wait. From private initiatives, such as the shelter enabled in the Círculo de Bellas Artes to civic projects such as Reverdeciendo Jardines, which arose in 2017 in the neighborhood of Puerta del Ángel.
“It started with four or five residents from the district who decided to improve the green areas near our homes. The main method was simple: take the flowerpots out of our houses and take care of them in the gardens,” explains Jesús González, neighbor and member of the platform. A couple of years ago, part of their efforts were focused on the “non-park”, a dirty and neglected wasteland where they saw many possibilities to create a pleasant space for the locals.
“Our goal, due to the extreme weather conditions we are suffering in the city, is to turn the whole area into a climate refuge,” Jesús says. To this end, they are in the process of planting trees, adding flowerbeds with plants and places to sit. They are not the only ones: there are similar neighborhood initiatives in the Lavapiés, Carabanchel and Usera areas. In the latter, around June 2024, a project of Asociación Realidades began operating to provide a climate shelter for homeless people.
It is a support service for the Madrid en Calle teams that serve the districts of Usera, Villaverde, Carabanchel and Vallecas so that they can refer unhoused people who are enduring a heat wave on the street to their day center, located at the Association's headquarters in Usera. “The idea is to facilitate this transfer as easily and quickly as possible, so that a basic registration of the person in the center is made, part of the care services are given and when the heat wave is over, the person can leave or use it as usual,” explains the head of the center, Bosco García.
The idea and the proposals are already there, the neighbors are involved, but they cannot replace the role of the public institutions. “In the end, these are private initiatives that are not connected to each other. A city council, to begin with, has access to municipal facilities, which are a lot of spaces at your disposal to create that network, although private spaces can be added later on. And this is currently missing in the city of Madrid,” concludes Elvira Jiménez.
Cover picture by: Luis Soto
Heat-resilient Cities
This report is part of a cross-border investigation carried out by Maldita.es (Spain), Mensagem de Lisboa (Portugal) and Slow News (Italy). The project focuses on analyzing the solutions that three European cities are carrying out to address the effects of increasing temperatures in population health.
In three reports we take an in-depth approach at the shared problem of high temperatures in Madrid, Lisbon and Milan and in three other articles we explore the Barcelona climate shelter network, the mapping of shelters in Lisbon and urban reforestation in Milan. In each article we look into the effectiveness of the solution, its limitations and its replicability in other cities.
This investigation has been developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
Heat is killing thousands in Southern European cities: what Barcelona, Milan and Lisbon are doing about it
Extreme heat in Madrid: citizens create their own climate shelters in response to limited institutional action
A place to escape the heat less than 10 minutes away: how Barcelona's network of "climate shelters" was built
