AEMET spokesman Ruben del Campo said the heatwave, which began on Sunday, could push temperatures up to 40C in Madrid and the southwest, and above 44C around the southern cities of Seville and Córdoba, describing it as “the first heatwave of summer”.

On Sunday, the highest temperature of 43.8C was recorded in El Granado, an area in Huelva province in the southern Andalusia region, he told reporters.

Spain, which had its hottest year on record in 2022, is expected to be one of the European Union countries worst hit by climate change.

Although it has become accustomed to soaring summer temperatures, notably in the south, Spain has experienced an uptick in longer and hotter heatwaves, experts say.

“In the last decade or so, the frequency of these warm episodes so is three times higher than in previous years. This is in line with summer getting longer by about 10 days per decade since the 1980s,” he said.

Estamos en un episodio de #OlaDeCalor. Es la primera del verano de 2023 y llega en junio. Probablemente, en su transcurso, se lleguen a alcanzar los 44 ºC. ¿Hay más olas de calor actualmente en junio? ¿Y a lo largo del verano? Hilo 🧵 pic.twitter.com/LjqucibVR6

— AEMET (@AEMET_Esp) June 25, 2023

At the end of April, Spain suffered a major heatwave with local temperatures up to 20C above average, exacerbating an ongoing drought.

The intense heat – which was more typical of July or August – pushed temperatures to record highs, with the mercury hitting 38.8C in the south in what AEMET said was Spain’s hottest spring on record in over 60 years of record-keeping.

Last month, the World Weather Attribution (WWA), whose scientists study the link between extreme weather events and global warming, said such extreme heat would have been “almost impossible without climate change”.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent which has been heating at twice the global average since the 1980s.

Since the mid-1800, the world has warmed an average of nearly 1.2C but in Europe, the figure is almost double, with the continent now 2.3C hotter than in pre-industrial times, the organisation said in a report last week.