Barcelona, Spain – The sky glows with the pink, orange and blue hues that commonly appear when the sun slips below the horizon – but the heat and humidity remain suffocating.
A group of Pakistani women take refuge from the scorching heat at the water’s edge on Barcelona’s beach in colourful, breezy cotton clothing, some letting the water wash over them as they lie on the wet sand. Others are dancing in the shallows to music from home blasting from a speaker, or cooling off under showers on the beach.
The Spanish city broke its heat record on July 8 , with temperatures reaching 40.7C (105F) during the European heatwave and the wider Barcelona province has recorded an estimated 205 heat-related deaths since the start of the month.
A study last year published by Nature Medicine projected that, in a worst-case scenario, the city could see more than 246,000 heat-attributable deaths between 2015 and 2099 – more than any other European city, mostly because of its Mediterranean location and urban density. Then there is the heat-island effect, in which densely built-up areas, pollution, asphalt and a lack of green spaces trap heat and drive temperatures up.
But within Barcelona itself, the risk of dying from the high temperatures is not evenly shared. El Raval, in the city’s old town, ranks as the most “heat-vulnerable” neighbourhood, especially at night, according to the Climate Vulnerability Index (IVAC), a tool created in 2022 to map which areas would be hit hardest
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In the years before it was developed, “there were an increasing number of heatwave episodes”, Elena Domene, the index’s coordinator and coauthor told Al Jazeera – hence the need to find out “where people would suffer most”.
In Barcelona, a heatwave is defined as three or more consecutive days with maximum temperatures above 33.1C (91.6F).
But El Raval is especially vulnerable to several risk factors: it is among the city’s 15 most densely populated neighbourhoods, it has Barcelona’s second-lowest median annual income at 15,050 euros, according to the Spanish National Statistics Institute, and is one of the neighbourhoods with the least green space, according to the Public Health Agency of Catalonia. Indoors, there is little relief. A map designed by the Architecture, Energy and Environment Research Group at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), shows that a high percentage of homes lack thermal insulation and cross-ventilation, trapping heat and creating an increasingly suffocating environment as temperatures soar.
The neighbourhood is also one of the migrant hearts of the city. With 67 percent of its residents born abroad – mainly Pakistan, the Philippines and India – it is home to the second-highest share of foreign-born residents, according to city council data.
A moment’s reprieve
Tucked down one of El Raval’s narrow streets, the Cultural, Educational and Social Association of Pakistani Women (ACESOP) offers some refuge from the heat. With fans whirring in the society’s hall, migrant women share a meal and support one another here each Friday.
ACESOP’s founder, Huma Jamshed Bashir, tells Al Jazeera that during hot afternoons and nights, many people in the community walk 20 minutes outside of the neighbourhood to find some respite in an air-conditioned shopping centre, or to the beach to escape their suffocating, overcrowded flats.
They usually stay until sleep overcomes them, she says. Those who struggle to walk that far sit instead along the Rambla del Raval, one of the few tree-lined spaces in the neighbourhood.
The lack of relief from the heat at night is measurable. By July 20 , Barcelona had already recorded 25 tropical nights – lows of 20-24.9C (68-77F) – and 25 “torridas” (translating to “torrid” in English, or “extremely hot”) nights with lows of 25-29.9C (77-86C), already catching up to the 36 nights of extreme heat that the city experienced during the whole of 2025.
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Reena Mazhar who visits the organisation some Fridays arrived in Barcelona from her native Lahore in Pakistan six months ago. Neither she nor her husband have found work yet. The couple share one room in a flat in El Raval, with four other people living in the next room. They don’t even have a fan.
“All I can do is keep wetting myself down, taking showers, or leaving the house in search of somewhere I can breathe,” the 40-year-old tells Al Jazeera, as she sits on a sofa in ACESOP’s living room. The other women remain at the table, chatting after lunch, sheltering from the heat outside.
Close to ACESOP, in a square with less than half its area shaded by trees, Adam Halui, a 16-year-old local, tilts his head back to stop a nosebleed – a condition triggered whenever the temperature spikes, he says. He washes his face in a public fountain in front of the Josep Trueta municipal centre for elderly people, an air-conditioned “climate shelter”.
Barcelona operates around 500 similar shelters – 15 in El Raval – including libraries, museums and parks. They are open to all who need them, however, they have limitations.
Blanca Arellano Ramos, an architect specialising in urbanism and a professor at UPC, co-authored a 2023 study on the effectiveness of the shelters for over-65s, one of the most vulnerable groups to high temperatures. Her findings show that at night, only 15 percent of the elderly population has access to one of the centres within a 10-minute walk, since many close after dark. Other centres, such as schoolyards designated as shelters, are closed during the summer months.
Furthermore, Arellano Ramos says, “quality matters – not just anything can be a shelter,” referring to the limited opening hours. “There has to be a place to sit, where you can drink water, or wash up,” she adds.
Inside the municipal senior centre, Margarita Medina, 70, is sitting at one of the tables. The lifelong Raval resident lives alone and suffers from fibromyalgia – a chronic condition causing widespread body pain and persistent fatigue. She has air conditioning at home but can’t use it because it irritates her condition.
“I don’t have enough oxygen in my lungs, so I really do suffer in the heat,” she said, as she collects her walker at the door of the senior centre.
A recent study by the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (IDRA) emphasises the risk elderly people like Medina are facing. According to its findings, older, low-income women living alone in poorly insulated housing are at the highest risk of death during heatwaves.
Ramos tells Al Jazeera that urban design needs to start focusing on the “renaturalisation of the city” by introducing more green spaces, although that would require significant water supply and enough space for trees to grow. While water is not scarce for now, it was restricted to essential uses only during the 2023 drought.
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Barcelona City Council is aiming to introduce warm-climate trees and ultimately wants them to make up 36 percent of trees in the Ciutat Vella district, where El Raval is located, as part of its climate adaptation plans.
However, Pere de Mas, the council’s urban trees coordinator, says that besides the economic and logistical obstacles, erratic winter cold snaps make it hard for such species to thrive and European nurseries remain heavily specialised in cold-climate trees.
“There are few producers of warm-climate trees,” de Mas told Al Jazeera.
Neighbours are doing it for themselves
Within the sweltering neighbourhood, an oasis that offers relief is facing the threat of closure.
A purely voluntary, self-managed community “green area”, it is a sheltered area built and maintained by the residents themselves.
In 2014, dozens of citizens occupied an apparently abandoned corner plot – previously an overgrown patch of wasteland – near where police had killed a man and established a community space named after him: Agora Juan Andres Benitez.
Six officers from the Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalonia’s regional police force, were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two years in prison for restraining Benitez. The 50-year-old was detained following a street fight, according to Spanish media. Police were found to have used disproportionate force against him for 12 minutes, which resulted in his death hours later in hospital.
The area has since become a “free space” with lush plants to cool the environment, purify the air and nurture biodiversity. But there has been pushback from the authorities and, now, a court has set an eviction date for 8 October.
“This is a community space that fosters social cohesion. We are in need of these kinds of spaces in the neighbourhood,” says Margarita Hernandez, an El Raval resident and member of the Agora – a term that refers to a meeting point, a discussion forum.
It isn’t just a free space to take refuge from the heat. Some 16,000 free or low-cost meals are served here annually, It also functions as an informal community-led care network where local families share caregiving responsibilities. It also hosts school visits, runs free educational workshops, provides health information and, ultimately, functions as a safe haven for El Raval’s most marginalised residents, including undocumented migrants, homeless people, sex workers and low-income families.
Users of the space fear there will soon be nowhere to escape the heat at all.
Isa Fernandez is sitting at a table under the lush greenery of the community space and worries about its loss.
“They don’t understand why we insist the Agora has to continue. They don’t realise what it means, how it affects the whole neighbourhood,” Fernandez says. “It’s become a place of welcome for a lot of people. It’s nice to come here – not like sitting on a bench in the street in the heat.”
Additional reporting by Diego Arredondo and Serena Lordache. Reporting for this article was supported by a 2025 Montserrat Roig Journalism Research Grant.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: aljazeera.com
