Europe on Wednesday braced for another day of a sweltering heat wave that has smashed records, left tens of thousands of people without power and sent air conditioning sales zooming in on a continent untapped and ill-equipped to handle scorching heat.
The extreme weather is being driven by atmospheric patterns that keep warm air trapped in place for days, with these factors exacerbated by global warming, experts said.
France’s national temperature indicator – an average of day and night temperatures across 30 stations – reached 29.8℃ on Tuesday, the hottest since measurements began in 1947.
With four more French departments under the highest heat alert category on Wednesday, around 44 million people are affected, according to AFP calculations.
Added to the 31 departments currently on orange alert, more than 90% of the French population is exposed to extreme heat, with temperatures of 39℃ to 41℃ expected on Wednesday from Brittany to the Paris region, and in large parts of the southwest.
The heat wave caused the country’s first major blackout of the latest bout of extreme weather after a heat-related incident with a transformer left about 68,000 households without electricity in the northwestern Finistere department on Wednesday, authorities said.
While crews worked through the night to fix the problem, which occurred late Tuesday, power is not expected to be fully restored until late Wednesday at the earliest.
Up to 106,000 customers of the French electricity grid were left without power late on Tuesday as scorching temperatures strained infrastructure built in the days before man-made climate change made heat waves longer, more frequent and more intense, according to scientists.
Sales of fans and air conditioners soared in a country where most buildings are not designed to withstand extreme heat.
On Monday, hypermarket operator Carrefour had sold 30,000 units by 6.30pm – “a thousand times more than on a normal day”, chief executive Alexandre Bompard said.
Sales on Amazon nearly doubled last week compared to the same period in 2025, while electronics retailer Fnac Darty reported double-digit growth.
Thierry, an electrician in south-west France, said he was overwhelmed by requests for “emergency” air conditioning.
“In theory, you have to submit a request to the owner’s association’s general meeting” in housing complexes, “but people don’t want to wait”.
“It’s hard to live” alone and without air conditioning, said Martine Belloc, a 62-year-old retiree in Bordeaux, who on Tuesday went to La ManuCo, a coworking space that mobilized to welcome older people.
‘We are suffocating’
John Beeler, a 45-year-old American engineer, said he and his wife were baking in the French capital.
“To visit Paris in this heat is terrible,” he told me AFPwearing a fisherman’s hat and holding a small fan.
“We are suffocating in the streets, we are suffocating in the subway and we are even suffocating in our rent,” he said, adding that they would move to an air-conditioned hotel room.
Italy’s health ministry declared a red heatwave alert in 16 cities on Wednesday, including Milan and Rome.
The heat wave is expected to extend into Eastern Europe in the coming days.
Poland’s weather service issued high-level heat warnings for the west of the country from Thursday to Saturday, forecasting temperatures could beat the record of 40.2℃ set in 1921.
Croatia’s popular Adriatic coast was also put under red alert on Friday and Saturday.
Hungary, already under a second-level heat alert, said it was raising it to the maximum level from Saturday to Tuesday as temperatures continued to rise.
The current heat wave is “significantly exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change”, without which current temperatures would have been 2℃ to 4℃ cooler, according to a scientific study published this week.
But some relief could start to come from the west on Wednesday, when Spain’s national weather service said temperatures would drop across most of the country.
No quick relief
But there is no rapid temperature drop in sight in much of the rest of Western Europe.
From Wednesday until at least Friday, the central and southern Netherlands will be under a code orange for extreme heat.
Anyone who lives in Amsterdam with a city card can swim for free in six outdoor pools in the city, while national railway company NS will run fewer trains on a number of routes from Wednesday.
In the UK, James Bowen, assistant general secretary at the National Association of Head Teachers, said AFP that “virtually every school up and down the UK will have to make some sort of adjustment this week in light of the extreme heat.
“I think it’s fair to say that the school estate in the UK is not well prepared for this level of heat,” he said.
After some of France’s most visited sites, such as the Louvre Museum and the Eiffel Tower, decided to limit visiting hours, the management of one of Belgium’s best-known monuments, the space-age Atomium in Brussels, said it would close earlier to visitors from Wednesday to Friday.
