For decades, long before air conditioners and the fans will take Every corner of its geography, Spain knew how to handle the heat: during the day, everything was closed tight; at night, everything open and ventilate.
It sounds rudimentary, but in 2026 that is still the strategy we recommends the Ministry of Health. And yet, there is a problem.
The Spain of the blinds game did not sleep in cities at 26 degrees at four in the morning. Not 26, not 28, not more than 30, as has been happening these days in Almería. The arrival of the ‘hellish nights’ challenges everything we thought we knew about domestic heat management. Therefore, we have asked ourselves… and now what?
What we were doing until now. That popular knowledge I was talking about goes viral every time the heat makes an appearance. And, like I say, it makes sense. In a world where it cools down at night, the winning strategy is night cooling and daytime insulation. What he says Health Plan against high temperatures.
The central issue here is that that world has ceased to exist.
Because the key is not the time, it is the thermometer. In reality, what we are looking for is to open when it is cool and close when it is hot. It’s usually cool at night, but…
What if he stops doing it? Summer has stretched on for five weeks and Spain is about two degrees warmer than at the beginning of the eighties. The torrid nights (with minimums of 25 degrees or more) have multiplied by ten since 1984 in the ten most populated capitals and, according to AEMET data, this affects about nine million people. Even the tropical ones (minimums of 20 or more) today add a dozen more a year than decades ago.
We can’t sleep… although researchers have not agreed on the ideal temperature for sleeping (some point which is about 18.3ºC, but there is no consensus), they have done so on a fundamental idea: sleeping in the heat is objectively a bad idea.
For whatever reason, it is true that our temperature changes between wakefulness and sleep. In fact, “thermal regulation is a significant factor” in sleep control, explained the teacher Cameron Van Den Heuvelfrom the University of Adelaide. “About an hour to thirty minutes before sleep, the body begins to lose body heat. This increases feelings of tiredness in normal healthy adults.”
People with insomnia, without going any further, “show that they have a higher basal temperature just before sleeping than people who do not have sleep problems.” Ambient heat does not help this thermal reduction and it seems to be proven that when the temperature is very high, it is more difficult to fall asleep and, when it is achieved, it is of very poor quality.
And then what do we do? In the interior of the peninsula, as the thermal amplitude remains high, opening at dawn works. There is nothing to change.
The problem is for those who live on the coast or in the big city. When the night exceeds 20 degrees, the strategy is reversed. Ventilating at night is no longer the main technique and the battle is won during the day: you have to seal the house as soon as the street heats up, squeeze out the thermal inertia and use the air conditioning wisely.
However, as the nights get warmer the household tricks come to an end. If the trend is confirmed, we will have to assume that the housing stock must be transformed: sun protection, rehabilitation and climate shelters will be the buzzwords in a few years.
Image | Fernando Rosado
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