'Frying Pan Spain' Braces For Worst Of The Heatwave

For Kinvara Vaughan, the prospect of record temperatures hitting the Mediterranean from today fills her with dread.

- GRAHAM KEELEY

"I saw the headline: heat storm heading for Europe this week. It is terrifying. We are doing a spectacular job destroying the planet,” she says from her home in Marbella, southern Spain. Parts of southern Europe could hit its hottest ever temperature on Italy’s islands of Sicily and Sardinia, where a high of 48C (118F) is predicted, according to the European Space Agency.

Spain’s Aemet weather agency said the heatwave this week “will affect a large part of the countries bordering the Mediterranean” with temperatures in some southern areas of Spain exceeding 42C, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. The power of the sun is very real for Vaughan, given a discovery by her doctors earlier this year. “They discovered three moles with stage one melanoma and they could treat them. They said that I would not need chemotherapy. It was a shock as I had not been for a check-up for over three years. I was so lucky,” the 47-year-old half-British, half-Canadian equestrian centre manager tells The Independent.

On Gill Allan’s balcony at her home in the southern Andalusian hills, even in the shade the thermometer hits 32C. After a quick early morning walk with her dog Bozo, she is not going outside in the baking heat for the rest of the day. Like millions of others across southern Europe, she was struggling to cope with the soaring heat as a second heatwave scorches Spain, Italy and Greece. Sometimes literally.