Spain registered its third-warmest year on record in 2025, with 25 single-day heat records set during the period, national weather agency Aemet said Wednesday.
The country is considered a frontline region for climate change, experiencing increasingly long heatwaves that sometimes start before summer, along with more frequent episodes of intense rainfall.
Aemet said 2025 tied with 2024 as Spain’s third-warmest year since records began in 1961, with an average temperature of 15.1C.
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That figure was 1.1C above the average annual temperature of the 1991-2020 reference period.
“The four years with the highest average temperature in Spain in the entire series are the last four,” AEMET spokesman Ruben del Campo told reporters.
Spain sweltered through its hottest summer on record last year, with an average temperature of 24.2C, contributing to destructive and deadly wildfires across several regions.
Europe and the rest of the world could face another extremely hot summer as the El Niño weather phenomenon, which pushed global temperatures to record highs in 2024, returned in the middle of the year.
El Niño is a natural occurrence that warms surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, bringing worldwide changes in winds and rainfall patterns and erratic weather.
Scientists fear it will exacerbate the heat of a planet already warming from burning fossil fuels, while amping up weather extremes.
Del Campo said the “most likely scenario” is that this summer will be warmer than normal across Spain.
Scientists say human-driven climate change is amplifying extremes, with heatwaves, droughts and floods becoming longer, more intense and frequent.
