Europe swelters under early heatwave as France records its hottest day ever

France recorded its hottest day ever on Tuesday amid an exceptional heatwave, the national weather agency said.

It said France’s national thermal indicator – an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations – hit a new record of 29.8C. The previous record of 29.4C dated back to heatwaves of August 2003 and July 2019.

Daytime highs above 40C were also recorded in many individual weather stations, Meteo France said.

The national weather service placed 54 areas of France under a red heatwave alert.

In a country without widespread air-conditioning, schools, trains and sporting events remain affected while 40 drowning deaths have been reported since last week.

French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said the 40 people who died by drowning since last Thursday were mainly young people.

In Paris, the Eiffel Tower adjusted its operations to the scorching weather, closing in the afternoon instead of late at night as it usually does.

Human-caused climate change is tied to increasing extreme weather and UN climate agency projections suggest the next five years will shatter more heat records.

“Sunshine continues to dominate across France, maintaining oppressive and exhausting heat throughout the country,” Meteo France said.

Extreme conditions are expected to last at least until the end of the week, with daytime highs above 40C in many towns.

“Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year,” Meteo France said.

The heatwave is exceptionally intense, coming very early in the summer, “but with a still uncertain duration”, the weather service said.

It has already been compared with the August 2003 heatwave, when the highest temperatures in more than half a century caused an estimated 15,000 deaths, many of them older people in apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning.

France introduced a heat watch warning system after that heatwave.

Further south on the continent, Spain is facing a heatwave across various parts of the Iberian Peninsula.

Spain’s national weather service, Aemet, issued red alerts on Tuesday for temperatures of 44C in southern Andalusia as well as warnings of 40C in the normally temperate Cantabria and the Basque Country regions along its northern Atlantic coast.

Aemet meteorologist Rubén del Campo said Spain, which has experienced increasingly torrid summers of late, is only going to get hotter because of climate change as heatwaves become more frequent, longer and appear outside the traditional window of July and August.

Of the dozen heatwaves Aemet has recorded in the month of June since it started tracking them in 1975, half have occurred since 2015, Mr del Campo said.

Human-driven climate change is heating up the atmosphere, both above Spain and in the surrounding sea waters, he said.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Over the last four years, more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes, and most of those deaths were preventable, the World Health Organisation’s Europe office said this month. The above-average temperatures can cause heat exhaustion and life-threatening heat stroke.

The EU monitoring agency found that in Europe, and globally, 2024 was the hottest year on record and the continent experienced its second-highest number of “heat stress” days.

Scientists warn that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness, especially in south-eastern Europe, making the region more vulnerable to health impacts and wildfires.