Europe swelters under record heat wave as France closes schools

Spain’s nurses union said some hospital areas reached or exceeded 30C even as France closed more than 800 schools and canceled 10 percent of trains serving the Paris region under a heat wave that exposed how fragile Europe’s public buildings have become under climate stress. The contrast was stark: in hospitals, where cooling can be a matter of life and death, basic air conditioning was still missing in some wards while patients and staff were forced to work through punishing heat.

France sat at the center of the emergency. Météo-France placed 54 of the country’s 96 mainland departments under a red heatwave alert, covering about 90 percent of the population. The national weather agency said June 2026 brought France its hottest day since measurements began in 1947 and its hottest night ever recorded. Temperatures reached 36C to 43C across the country on June 22, with the heat wave having begun on June 17.

The strain spread beyond classrooms and rail lines. Officials said 40 people drowned in France between June 18 and June 23 as people looked for relief from the heat, and many of the victims were young people. Sporting events, tourist sites and daily travel were disrupted across France and much of Europe as cities tried to keep pace with a weather system that arrived faster than much of the built environment can absorb.

The episode has revived memories of France’s August 2003 heat wave, which killed an estimated 15,000 people, many of them older adults in apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning. France introduced its heat-watch warning system after that disaster, but the latest emergency has reopened a harder debate about whether schools, hospitals and other public buildings were designed for a climate that no longer exists.

The pressure is not limited to France. The World Health Organization’s Europe office said more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes over the last four years, most of them preventable. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has said Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.