For decades, the beaches of the Mediterranean have been a place of pilgrimage for masses of employees in search of pleasure and fun. Now, the effects of the climate crisis on meteorology threaten its future.
"My generation never anticipated that this country that was so beautiful would end up in this situation. Psychologically it is disastrous, because one of the few privileges of Greece was a mild climate. Now we have nothing left." The one who reasons in such a lapidary way is Petros Márkaris , crime novel writer. “I fear that what we knew as the Mediterranean climate is going to disappear,” he adds.
Catastrophe comes from the Greek 'katastrophe', meaning ruin and destruction. It is what best fits what this summer has been like for the Greeks. First a long drought and unusually high temperatures. Then a wave of fires (the one in the Evros region lasted 17 days). Finally, a devastating storm, named Daniel, flooded the best agricultural lands in Thessaly, in the center of the country.
Márkaris is not a meteorologist, but he is good at reading the mood of the Greeks. The Mediterranean has always been synonymous with a mild and moderate climate. The climate explains the birth of classical civilizations in that area. It is the landscape that the upper classes will later idealize. They will travel to the South or spend long stays surrounded by that domesticated nature in what will later become the social practice of summer vacations.
Without the fascination with the Costa Brava of writers and artists such as Josep Maria de Segarra, J.V. Foix, Eugeni d'Ors, Josep Pla, Picasso or Dalí, Catalan culture would not be what it is. Neither did the European: Marc Chagall, Otho Lloyd, Dora Maar, Henri Michaux and Marcel Duchamp, among others, looked to her for inspiration.
The summer holiday slowly died out in the middle of the last century. He was a victim of the popularization of the car and the apartment. Vacations were democratized, they became an annual break paid for by companies, one of the greatest social achievements obtained in the years following World War II.
The tourism industry was a UK invention. But the setting that stole the dreams of the employees of Central and Northern Europe was the shores of the Mediterranean. If bourgeois and artists said they traveled motivated by rest and contemplation, what motivated the masses of workers to go to the beach was pleasure and fun.
And in small doses, also for that affordable happiness that for the British at the end of the 20th century meant moving to live in the Mediterranean. A popular television series, Living in the Sun, in 2007 told how those dreams came true. The host of the reality show followed the couples to the Costa del Sol. He filmed their visits to the real estate agencies, accompanied them as they settled into the apartments and houses they chose to live in, tasted the paellas they improvised and shared with them the beers they drank. in the bar next door.
The Brexit of 2016 was a first setback for the colony of Britons settled in Spain (more than 250,000). Today it is likely that “living in the sun” that the television series advertised is less appealing. Sunbathing and walking is pleasant (and depending on how, recommended) below 30 degrees. Today, summers add between two and three heat waves each year with temperatures that rise to 40 degrees and require immobility in the afternoons. Tropical nights, in which there is no way to go below twenty degrees, have become more frequent.
The new Mediterranean meteorology has not respected this year even the most sacred icons of millennial childhood, that sugary comedy with Abba songs that is Mamma Mia. If today Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan wanted to rekindle their youthful loves on the Greek islands of Skópelos and Skhiatos, where the film takes place, they would most likely be blocked by torrential rains like those that hit those islands the first week of September.
According to John Urry, father of the sociology of tourism, vacations are perceived as an essential period of our modern times. They are those days of disconnection, of letting go and forgetting daily worries, which favors our reset, our physical and mental restoration. Without that annual prospect of interruption, of downtime, our work lives, he reasons, could become unbearable.
The tourism industry has been created on this premise, which has allowed this sector to become the leading economic activity on the planet.
The tourism industry likes to think that this summer of 2023 has been exceptional, an aberration of nature. But if you look at the data coldly, they are not that different from previous years. They only show the slow progression of those phenomena imposed by climate change. This summer's fires have been in line with the average for the period 2006-2022. Cyclones like Daniel are becoming more frequent. As is also the progression of drought and the increase in temperatures, they are in line with this evolution.
Will the Mediterranean summer survive these changes? There are those who are betting on a movement of tourists towards the North. But there are also those who predict that there will be people who will have no choice but to adapt and assume that vacations are not only a moment of placidity but also include extreme situations in the offer. Although that is not in the contract.
