Avoid the Spanish Gota Fria!

[BeeKeeper]

I came back at the end of last week after a trip into Spain of nearly 6 weeks in our campervan. We had a great time but we also experienced some very wet and thundery weather, all the way down to the very tip of Spain. This was I must confess a bit unexpected. We had some very warm weather too but the thunderstorms lasting in one case over 3 hours were memorable.

Exchanging e-mails with someone who has lived in Spain for decades it seems this is not a new phenomena and is known to the Spaniards as a gota fria or "cold drop". It occurs in the autumn along the Spanish Mediterranean coast when moisture from the warm seas ascends into the atmosphere and hits cold air in the upper atmosphere. The storms are worst along the coast but the effects stretch far inland.

I raise this because we met a couple of cyclists on the ferry on the trip to Santander who were planning to cycle across Spain to Cadiz. I can only hope they had better weather than we experienced for the first few weeks of our holiday.

The lessons is - avoid southern Spain on September and October up until about the 15th. You may of course be lucky, but statistically, this is the danger period, especially when the summer starts early as it did this year.

http://spain.angloinfo.com/moving/count ... gota-fria/

[HarryD]

Beekeeper, looks like you were very unlucky with the weather. The link refers to eastern and not southern Spain. I've toured southern Spain many times in Sept & Oct and not had any issues with poor weather and certainly not enough to put me off. The extreme weather and average climate data do not support avoiding the area either.

We had a couple of wet days in Lozere, southern France, in sept when it rained non-stop for 36hours and at its peak dropped 228mm in a two hour period. Apparently not an uncommon event but no one would advise avoiding the area.

Bad weather happens.