Spain's holy week crushed under a polar air mass
Storm Therese is barely out the door and Spain is already bracing for the next hit. A polar air mass is moving in just as millions of families pack their bags for Holy Week, and AEMET, Spain's national meteorological agency, isn't sugarcoating it: this Easter will be cold. Not catastrophically wet, but cold enough to sting.
The nineteenth storm of the season, and counting
Therese earned its place in the record books before leaving. It delivered the most intense storm the Canary Islands had seen in over a decade and dragged temperatures down to 8°C in the interior of the peninsula. It was the nineteenth named storm of the season. The season isn't over.
What meteorologists are watching now is a pattern that has defined this entire winter and shows no sign of breaking: a relentless chain of Atlantic depressions feeding a swollen polar jet stream that keeps hammering the peninsula, one system after another, barely pausing for breath. Spain hasn't recorded a cold-day record in four years, but the sheer persistence of this pattern is something forecasters are taking seriously.
What the models are actually showing
The dominant setup for Holy Week involves an anticyclonic ridge pushing north over the Atlantic, which sounds reassuring until you realize what it drags in its wake: a sharp intrusion of cold polar air. Galicia and the Cantabrian coast take the worst of it, with frost expected in the northern mountain ranges and a abrupt temperature drop that will feel nothing like early April.
The good news, if you can call it that, is AEMET isn't forecasting a washout. The Easter travel exodus on Friday the 27th looks largely dry for most of the country, with sunshine dominating the interior and the south. The exceptions are the usual suspects: the Canary Islands, the Pyrenees, and the Cantabrian fringe, where some rain is possible but nothing severe. The Balearic Islands get light morning showers early in the period.
Sunday is the shakiest day. Overnight instability hits the Balearics hard, the Pyrenees see heavy rain, and the Cantabrian coast gets a lighter but persistent drizzle. Nothing that rewrites the week, but enough to remind you this isn't summer.
The cold is the real story here
Forget the rain for a moment. The temperature picture is what will define how people actually experience this Holy Week. Highs across the northern half of Spain will struggle to clear 15°C. The 20°C threshold only gets crossed in the southwest, where Seville reaches a relatively comfortable 22°C. Everywhere else, pack a jacket. A real one.
Scientists have been pointing to something larger behind all of this: a measurable shift in seasonal patterns, a destabilization of the natural rhythms that once made Spanish springs predictable. Whether this particular cold snap is a symptom of that or just a bad roll of the atmospheric dice, the practical effect is the same. Easter 2025 arrives wrapped in a polar overcoat, and AEMET's own forecasters are already calling it colder than what we've come to expect at the start of April.
It won't be the worst Holy Week in recent memory. But four years of no cold-day records, followed by a spring that refuses to actually feel like spring, is the kind of slow erosion that's harder to photograph than a flooded town square — and considerably harder to ignore.