Spain is experiencing its coldest Christmas in 15 years, according to state weather agency Aemet.
The public service said in a report that you have to go back to 2010 to find average temperatures this low over December 24 and 25.
The longer-term trend, however, remains the opposite, with increasingly mild winters, particularly since the start of the 21st century.
Over the past decade, Spain has recorded the lowest number of cold spells in the historical series, which dates back to the 1960s.
While a cold wave used to be fairly typical each winter, 2024 became the fifth year with none at all, joining 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020.
To find a genuinely harsh winter, meteorologists point back to 2005, when Spain endured 34 consecutive days of cold-wave conditions, with temperatures well below the historical average for more than a month.
That winter now stands out as an exception. In most recent years, maximum temperatures have increasingly resembled those of autumn or even spring.
Last winter, the average temperature across mainland Spain was 7.8C, around 1.2C above the 1991–2020 reference period, making it the fifth warmest of the century so far. The warmest winters on record were 2019–2020 and 2023–2024.
December 2025 had also been tracking warmer than normal for much of the month, Aemet confirms, before a major atmospheric shift reversed the trend.
Looking specifically at December 24 and 25, and comparing forecasts with data going back to 1950, meteorologists say this will be the coldest Christmas nationwide since 2010.
The sudden change is being driven by a so-called ‘Scandinavian blocking’ pattern – a large high-pressure system over northern Europe that disrupts the jet stream.
This has opened the door for cold, humid air masses from both the North Atlantic and northeastern Europe, including Siberia, to reach Spain and the islands.
Aemet stresses that Christmases this cold are now exceptional and will become increasingly rare as average temperatures continue to rise. Even with this cold snap, meteorologists note that the first week of Christmas is still around 2.1C warmer than it was in the mid-20th century.
‘Experiencing Christmas conditions like those of 1962 now seems very unlikely,’ they say – a year remembered for a three-day snowfall in Barcelona that left 46 centimetres of snow and turned central streets into makeshift ski runs.
