Europe swelters under severe heatwave as Italy, Spain issue alerts

Europe was baked under a severe heat wave as temperatures neared 40 degrees Celsius and warnings spread from Italy to Germany, turning the summer solstice into a stress test for health systems, transport networks and public life. In Rome, pilgrims and visitors shielded themselves with parasols and umbrellas while officials moved to protect the most vulnerable.

Italy issued a red alert for eight cities and relied on a heatwave bulletin system that runs from May to September for 27 cities, with forecasts updated Monday through Friday at 11 a.m. for the next 24, 48 and 72 hours. Spain’s red and orange alerts covered much of the Iberian Peninsula and Mallorca, where a 22-year-old engineer from Miami said she carried a small electric fan while walking through Madrid’s El Rastro market. The country’s weather agency says its warning system is built to give detailed alerts for adverse weather up to 72 hours ahead and to track conditions continuously once they begin.

The heat was already pushing public infrastructure beyond comfort into disruption. In France, SNCF chief Jean Castex said the rail network was strongly affected, with overheating tracks and overhead lines creating risks that forced dozens of intercity cancellations and sent emergency repair crews into the field. Regional traffic pages showed some eastern France services being adjusted so only air-conditioned trains would run, a reminder that adaptation now extends to the basic design of timetables and rolling stock.

Germany faced temperatures as high as 38C, along with warnings of thunderstorms and festival disruption. The Deutscher Wetterdienst warns that severe thunderstorms can bring danger to life and limb through lightning, falling trees and damaged power lines, which is why a heat wave can quickly become a multi-hazard emergency rather than a single weather event.

The public health toll is the deeper warning. The World Health Organization says Europe lost more than 200,000 people to heat over the past four years, and that nearly all of those deaths were preventable. It estimates 61,672 heat-related excess deaths in Europe during the summer of 2022, after more than 20,000 people died in the August 2003 heat wave. WHO/Europe says extreme heat is becoming a recurring crisis that strains health systems and infrastructure, and that cardiovascular disease can worsen under heat.

Copernicus and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts said most of Europe was expected to stay well above average, after Western Europe had already endured an exceptionally early and intense heat wave in late May, with daily average temperatures more than 10C above normal in parts of western France, England and Wales. The lesson is hard to miss: even rich countries are still not fully built for recurring extreme heat, and each new alert now reads less like an anomaly than a rehearsal for a hotter future.