The climate of 60 cities, compared

What the averages say

Of the 50 Spanish cities with official normals, the wettest is Vigo, at 1,694 mm a year, and the driest Almería, at 198 mm — 8.6 times less. The warmest is Santa Cruz de Tenerife (21.7 °C annual mean) and the coldest Burgos (11.0 °C). Huelva accumulates the most sunshine, around 3,143 hours a year, and Burgos records the most frost days, 77 a year.

Sunshine is shown only for the 38 cities whose observatory has all twelve months measured; elsewhere AEMET does not publish the complete series and the cell is left empty rather than inventing a total.

These are thirty-year averages, not a forecast: they tell you what is normal in a place and what is not, which is exactly what tomorrow’s forecast does not say.

Spain · AEMET normals 1991-2020

Temperatures in °C, rainfall in mm, sunshine in hours per year. Main observatory of each city.

Other cities around the world

There is no single body equivalent to AEMET here, so the same series is used for all of them: ERA5-Land from the Copernicus Climate Data Store, 1995-2024. The figures are comparable with one another, though a reanalysis cannot see the urban heat island and its minima fall somewhat below those of an observatory in the centre of a large city.

Where these figures come from

The 50 Spanish cities use AEMET’s 1991-2020 climatological normals, computed at the main observatory of each city. The 10 international ones use ERA5-Land from the Copernicus Climate Data Store under a CC-BY licence, 1995-2024, on a grid of about 9 km.

The two series measure the same things but not in the same way, so compare within each table rather than between them.