Extreme weather continues to ravage parts of southern Europe, with an “excessive heat” warning in Italy, rare “meteo-tsunami” waves hitting the Balearic Islands and deadly wildfires ravaging Turkish villages.
The mercury is expected to hit 42C in the southern Italian town of Foggia today, while hotels in Sicily have reportedly turned away tourists amid a drought on the island.
In Spain, a dramatic video has shown the moment a huge wave rose over the road in the Balearic resort town of Puerto Alcudia, an area popular with tourists.
A similar video emerged today of a strange wave sweeping away sun loungers in Menorca earlier this week.
Meanwhile, in southeastern Turkey, five people were killed and dozens injured when a massive forest fire devastated several villages overnight, the country’s health minister said Friday.
Images posted on social media showed flames sweeping across a large area, consuming entire swaths of forest and lighting up the night sky as vast clouds of smoke rose into the air.
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Firefighters work to extinguish a fire near Kumkoy, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Türkiye.
Rome was hit by a heatwave this week and tourists pictured queuing for water outside the Colosseum.
The water overflows the boardwalk and reaches a town in Mallorca due to a ‘meteo-tsunami’
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) seasonal forecast covering July, August and September predicts extreme and higher than average temperatures in the Mediterranean (pictured: probability of temperatures being in the highest percentiles of the climatology for seasonal means, with an ‘above-normal change exceeding the 80th percentile)
Italy is now also bracing for wildfires, with warnings that the heatwave combined with dry conditions could produce ideal circumstances for fires in areas such as Sardinia and Sicily.
The island has been on the front line in dealing with hotter summers due to climate change, recording the highest temperature on record in Europe of 48.8°C in 2021.
Summers are also becoming longer and hotter, with concerns that extreme heat is already taking hold in the area early in the season.
In Agrigento, a destination known for its incredible Greek temples, tourists are being turned away from bed and breakfasts because the water supply is running low.
Francesco Picarella, local director of the Federalberghi hoteliers’ association, told the Times this week: ‘The water supply is cut off two or three times a week. All houses have cisterns to store water, but for some it is not enough.
‘Places without water divert tourists to other B&Bs. And we’re only in June.
The capital Rome has also experienced severe heat, with images of tourists queuing for water outside the Colosseum.
The heatwave is expected to peak today, before a weather system moves into northern regions and is expected to bring downpours, with warnings of thunderstorms and heavy rain causing flooding.
Chairs are seen submerged in the water after the storm surge in Mallorca, with people walking nearby
Water was filmed cascading over the roads of the popular tourist town of Puerto Alcudia.
In video of the moment the water falls on the road, people can be seen walking alongside the alarming flood.
Meanwhile, a mass of hot air has caused a strange meteorological phenomenon in Mallorca: the so-called “meteotsunami”.
In a video of the moment the water falls on the road, people can be seen walking alongside the alarming flood in Puerto Alcudia, on the northeast coast of the island.
According to meteorologists, this phenomenon, locally called “rissaga”, is due to storms over the air mass.
Rapidly changing weather events, such as thunderstorms, cause water to rise or fall “noticeably” in just a few minutes and without warning.
Spanish Met Office spokesperson Miquel Gili explained: ‘Variations in pressure affect sea level.
‘If the pressure increases, the sea goes down; If the pressure drops, the sea rises. The main characteristic of these ups and downs is that
“In just 15 minutes the sea level can rise or fall very noticeably and then return to its normal state.”
It comes after an amber weather alert was issued for the Spanish island on Tuesday.
Spain’s national meteorological agency, AEMET, warned that there was a 40 to 70 percent chance of a meteotsunami between Wednesday at 6 p.m. and Thursday at 8 a.m.
Tourists hold umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun as they walk near the Colosseum amid a heat wave in Rome.
Claira from Massachusetts uses a fan connected to her iPhone to cool herself while waiting in line to enter the Roman Forum
Tourists try to cope with the heat as the air temperature reaches 42 degrees Celsius on the streets of Rome.
A woman fills her bottle with water at a fountain near the Colosseum amid a heat wave in Rome, Italy, on June 20, 2024.
Meanwhile, it is dry conditions that are plaguing Turkey, allowing oven-like wildfires to break out in the southeastern Kurdish region that have caused deaths.
“Five people died and 44 were injured, 10 of them seriously,” when the fire devastated two areas between the provinces of Diyarbakir and Mardin, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said the fire started late on Thursday, when a “stubble burn” about 30 kilometers south of Diyabakir spread rapidly due to strong winds and affected five villages.
The Health Minister said seven emergency teams and 35 ambulances were sent to the scene.
Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM party in a post on X urged authorities to “quickly intervene” to combat the fire from the air that burned early on Friday.
‘Until now, intervention from the field has not been enough. “The authorities must intervene more broadly and from the air, without wasting time,” he stated.
Footage shows smoke billowing over an area of southern Türkiye amid wildfires.
Smoke rises as firefighting planes drop water to extinguish a fire in a wooded area yesterday
Firefighters work to extinguish a fire near Kumkoy, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey, Tuesday, June 18, 2024.
According to the latest figures from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), Turkey has suffered 74 forest fires so far this year, which have devastated 12,910 hectares of land.
In the summer of 2021, Turkey suffered the worst wildfires in its history, claiming nine lives and destroying huge swaths of forested land on its Mediterranean and Aegean coasts.
The disaster sparked a political crisis after it emerged that Turkey had no operational firefighting planes, increasing pressure on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was forced to accept international help.
It also prompted Ankara to push for Turkey’s long-delayed ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement, becoming the last of the Group of 20 major economies to do so.
Experts say climate change will lead to more fires and other disasters in Turkey unless action is taken to address the problem.
