Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Aug 04, 2008 - 10:38 AM environment

It's the hottest week of the year, and much of Spain and Portugal is on some kind of heat alert. These are issued by the national meteorological institutes of each country, and are colour-coded green, yellow, orange and red, from safe to dangerous. The Portuguese districts on orange alert (indicating an "important risk") are Bragança, Guarda, Portalegre and Évora. The Spanish provinces on orange alert are Toledo and Ciudad Real in Castile-La Mancha and Jaén, Córdoba and Sevilla in Andalusia. Read more.

In Portugal, the districts of Braga, Vila Real, Viseu, Castelo Branco, Lisboa, Setúbal, and Beja are on yellow alert. In Spain, the provinces of Ourense in Galicia, León, Zamora, Valladolid, Segovia and Ávila in Castile and León, the whole of Aragón (Zaragoza, Huesca and Teruel), Lerida and Tarragona in Catalonia, Madrid, Guadalajara, Cuenca and Albacete in Castile-La Mancha, the whole of Extremadura (Cáceres and Badajoz), the Valencia region except Castellón (Valencia and Alicante), Murcia, and Cádiz and Granada in Andalusia are all on yellow alert.

In both countries, the heat is expected to remit very slightly over the course of the week.

These alerts are largely issued for the benefit of health authorities, who are advised in this way of the resources they need to dedicate to anticipate heat-related disease and deaths, especially among vulnerable sectors of the population - the elderly, the very young and the infirm. If orange indicates a moderately high risk (when you should be very careful of your own health and doubly careful about the health of those in your care), yellow alert is issued for areas considered to be "at low risk," which does not mean you should abandon all precaution.

More information:
What to do about The Heat Threat
The Spanish Met Office
The Portuguese Met Office