Inside Barcelona’s most sweltering neighbourhood: El Raval
Densely packed apartments, low incomes, a lack of tree cover and uninsulated housing have placed the migrant heart of the city on Europe’s frontline of
Densely packed apartments, low incomes, a lack of tree cover and uninsulated housing have placed the migrant heart of the city on Europe’s frontline of extreme temperatures. Barcelona, Spain – The sky glows with the pink, orange and blue hues that commonly appear when the sun slips below the horizon – but the heat and humidity remain suffocating. A group of Pakistani women take refuge from the scorching heat at the water’s edge on Barcelona’s beach in colourful, breezy cotton clothing, some letting the water wash over them as they lie on the wet sand. Others are dancing in the shallows to music from home blasting from a speaker, or cooling off under showers on the beach. The Spanish city broke its heat record on July 8, with temperatures reaching 40.7C (105F) during the European heatwave and the wider Barcelona province has recorded an estimated 205 heat-related deaths since the start of the month. A study last year published by Nature Medicine projected that, in a worst-case scenario, the city could see more than 246,000 heat-attributable deaths between 2015 and 2099 – more than any other European city, mostly because of its Mediterranean location and urban density. Then there is the heat-island effect, in which densely built-up areas, pollution, asphalt and a lack of green spaces trap heat and drive temperatures up. But within Barcelona itself, the risk of dying from the high temperatures is not evenly shared. El Raval, in the city’s old town, ranks as the most “heat-vulnerable” neighbourhood, especially at night, according to the Climate Vulnerability Index (IVAC), a tool created in 2022 to map which areas would be hit hardest In the years before it was developed, “there were an increasing number of heatwave episodes”, Elena Domene, the index’s coordinator and coauthor told Al Jazeera – hence the need to find out “where people would suffer most”. In Barcelona, a heatwave is defined as three or more consecutive days with maximum temperatures above 33.1C (91.6F). But El Raval is especially vulnerable to several risk factors: it is among the city’s 15 most densely populated neighbourhoods, it has Barcelona’s second-lowest median annual income at 15,050 euros, according to the Spanish Statistics Institute, and is one of the neighbourhoods with the least green space, according to the Public Health Agency of Catalonia. Indoors, there is little relief. A map designed by the Architecture, Energy and Environment Research Group at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), shows that a high percentage of homes lack thermal insulation and cross-ventilation, trapping heat and creating an increasingly suffocating environment as temperatures soar.
The BriefWire