In my admittedly rather limited trips to Spain, I’ve never experienced anything like this. We’ve been coming here for two or three weeks at a time for the last seven years but I’d have to describe the weather that we’ve endured for the last eight or nine days as unusual. For over a week the skies have resembled those of an English winter, being a solid grey overcast with frequent, occasionally heavy spells of rain. It got worse today. Today had me dipping into my smart phone translation package – isn’t modern technology wonderful? – wondering what the Spanish words were for what we were suffering.
Our education began in a restrained manner with a little modest lluvia [rain]. We’ve seen plenty of this over the last week so no surprise there, though we had not previously bothered to look up the word.
The skies gradually got darker and heavy, black nubes [clouds] covered our part of the valley. The nubes began to be accompanied by some sound effects in the form of several rumbles of trueno [thunder]. After a few more rumbles, the lighting department, not wishing to be left out, got in on the act with some swift flashes of relámpago [lightning].
As the tormenta [storm] increased in ferocity, so did the rain. Soon, the rain became solid in nature and lumps of it began bouncing back up off our external window sills. We were being treated to some granizo [hail].
Casa Libélule is on the back/high row of our development There is a run of five blocks, each one of four or five houses, the roofs of which act as a catchment area for the rear pathway.onto which they spill their collected rain/hail. The only way down for the water and ice mixture to reach it’s point of lowest potential energy is down the flights of steps beside Casa. That flight of steps had now turned into something resembling a Welsh mountain cascada [waterfall]. The hail stones washed down and were collected in white piles at various strategic points. They remained for some time, not melting. Please forgive the crappy phone camera picture but hailstones were bouncing inside when I opened the window to take it.
Eventually the storm abated and we were left with just the hailstone debris.
Shortly afterwards, a good looking young English man who, judging by his upper torso development, spends a lot of time in the gym (and, I’d guess, women :shock:), arrived and proceeded to install the radio dish and router for our eagerly awaited Internet access. He did a very neat job, even using a spirit level to make sure the cable running between the dish and door frame was horizontal. After a little drilling we were online. At least, we were for a few minutes. The storm was cloaking the hillside across the opposite side of the valley, where the Internet service mast is located, and we soon lost our newly established contact with the outside world.
A reboot of the router fixed our connection problems, comme d’habitude/como siempre.
How educational weather can be.
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