‘Like working in a volcano': stories from six countries in Europe on a day of extreme heat

The Guardian

a day ago

Hundreds of millions of people across Europe suffered an extreme heatwave this week, with temperatures smashing records as the continent sweltered.
With the human-caused climate emergency pushing the mercury ever higher, early in the summer Europe is experiencing troubling temperatures.
From an Italian chef who works in a 60C kitchen to a homeless Dutch man given shelter in a basement, here is the story of how people across Europe coped, told over a single day this past week:
Ruth Michaelson
Onur Yıldırım woke up early on Tuesday morning and had a cold shower. If he starts the day any later, or without the shower, he'll be 'tired, depressed, and sweaty' all day. With a 12-hour shift of taxi driving ahead of him, he wanted to get on the road quickly.
The temperature was already above 20C, and by the end of the day, Turkish firefighters across the country would have fought back multiple wildfires.
Yıldırım is lucky – his car has functioning air conditioning, and many of his customers expect he'll use it. But he knows from previous summers that weeks of extreme temperature changes throughout the day can make him sick.
Lorenzo Tondo
In the searing heart of inland Sicily, Luigi Randazzo, 47, a sous-chef at a restaurant was plating a dish of mussels.
'I was working next to the kettle, where the thermometer read 60 degrees,' he said. 'The fryer was on. So was the oven. It felt like working inside a volcano.'
While diners waited in the cool comfort of air conditioning, Randazzo moved from burner to burner in the kitchen, clad in a chef's uniform soaked with sweat. 'It felt like someone had thrown a bucket of water in my face,' he said. 'We have an air conditioner in the kitchen, but it's completely useless when all the machines are running.'
In 2021, temperatures in Sicily hit a record 48.8C (119.8F). Randazzo works in the part of the island where the desert is slowly advancing across the countryside, and where, in the last six months of 2023, just 150mm of rain fell.
On Tuesday, Randazzo said he was dreaming of going home and taking an ice-cold shower. But the lunch service had just begun.
''My legs were trembling with exhaustion. But you know at that moment you can't stop – not even for a second,' he added. 'That hour felt like an entire summer.'
Senay Boztas
It was early afternoon in Amsterdam, and Karim Taif, 46, tried to escape the heat at a shelter for homeless people in the city.
'It's cool here and a good place,' said Taif. The well-known shelter, called De Kloof, is in the basement of a historic canal house and is open until 6pm to offer shade, showers, refreshments and sunscreen to the homeless community.
For the first time, the city now has a 'summer heat ruling' extending the opening hours of shelters.
Taif, who was born in Morocco, grew up in Amsterdam and once worked as a barman in Switzerland. But he struggled to find housing in the Netherlands after returning in 2021 and in October, he said, he crept into a boat tied to a dock. He was found by the owner, but they agreed to let him stay.
'In the winter, it is very cold and in the summer it is so hot, you have to get out of it very early,' said Taif.
'Everything is getting hotter and hotter,' said Taif, smoking a cigarette in the garden of the shelter. 'The south of Europe is drying up … and it feels like the Sahara is moving ever closer.'
Ajit Niranjan
Sven, 58, had felt the heat creep up over the last two weeks as he rewired a telecommunications box. By Tuesday afternoon, it had hit 33C, and would rise to a sweltering 37C the following day.
'I've set this up to meet my needs,' he said from under a bright green umbrella. 'I've got a coolbox, I avoid working under the blazing sun, and I put a cap on when it hits. Otherwise, it's a case of not moving too fast.'
German employees do not have a legal right to take time off work in the heat but bosses have a duty of care to their workers. This can mean setting up fans in offices or setting up shade on construction sites.
'For me, the heat is normal,' said Sven, 'but you do have to do things differently.'
Jon Henley
Built of cast iron and glass in 1866, a couple of decades before the Eiffel Tower, the Marché St Quentin is the largest covered food market in Paris.
It was designed to be light and airy in all seasons, but not for 39.3C – which is what the nearby Lariboisière weather station recorded at 5pm on Tuesday. 'It was inhumane, really brutal,' said Sahra Baadache, 27, one of the market's three cheesemongers.
'A sauna. A steam bath. St Quentin is basically a greenhouse and there's no way of ventilating or cooling it down. It was 42C in here by mid-afternoon. People really suffered. Stallholders who live nearby were going home for cold showers.'
Cheese and heat do not mix; textures and flavours change irreversibly. Baadache did what she could to save her 150-odd varieties, bringing out only a small fraction of her stock and covering up her two refrigerated display cabinets to keep the cold in.
'They survived, just,' she said. 'But I was a wreck – sweating about my cheeses, and sat behind two fridge motors generating even more heat.'
And, of course, there were no customers: 'No one came. So it was like a double punishment.'
Ashifa Kassam
On Tuesday evening, as most tourists wandered through Madrid's Plaza Mayor wearing as little clothing as possible, David, 40, climbed into a furry gorilla suit, layered with a Real Madrid shirt.
'I'm soaked through with sweat,' the street performer said. 'It's even hotter inside the suit, as the inner layer is canvas.'
Originally from Peru, he had started the job three months ago, perspiring his way through Spain's hottest June on record and now the first heatwave of the summer. 'I make enough to eat,' he said.
While the beating sun meant most tourists were huddled under the shade cast by the plaza's arcade or under the parasols and misting systems of the plaza's restaurants and cafes, Daniel hovered in the middle of the shadeless plaza, aiming to attract attention. Every now and then, he was successful, with a trickle of tourists darting towards him just long enough to snap a photo.
As temperatures climbed this week, he had done what he could to mitigate the heat, shifting his start time to early evening in the hope that the one- or two-degree drop in temperatures would offer some respite. A quick cold shower, before and after his shift, had also become a necessity. 'I play football, so that helps my body deal with the heat of the summer,' he said. 'But a job's a job – I have no other choice.'