Red warning on Mallorca
The sun always shines on Mallorca. Except on the night our phones screamed like an air-raid siren, a palm tree came down in the garden and the mountains disappeared behind the rain.
Here on Mallorca the sun always shines. That's what everyone thinks, and to be fair, most days it's true.
Then came Sunday night, 18 October. Every phone in the house went off at the same time with a sound I have only heard in war films. I honestly had no idea what it was. It turned out to be a rain alarm. Spain's weather agency, AEMET, had put the interior, the south and the east of the island on red warning from midnight to six in the morning, with forecasts of up to 90 litres per square metre in a single hour. That is more rain in sixty minutes than some months get.
In the middle of it
The worst of it didn't hit with the force that was forecast, and the warning was lowered to orange early Monday. But it was still pouring, and it was enough. One of our palm trees was down. The pool had more water than anyone asked for. And the mountains, which normally sit right there on the horizon, were simply gone. You could have told me we lived on a flat island and I would have believed you.
So I did what you shouldn't do. Went outside in the middle of the storm, filmed it, and asked my family if anyone fancied a swim.
Why I'm writing about the weather
Because I post a lot of sunsets and blue water, and that's accurate. It's sunny here almost all the time, and Mallorca gets about 440 mm of rain in a whole year, less than most Swedish cities. But when it does rain here, it often comes all at once.
In autumn the Mediterranean is still warm from the summer. When cold air arrives high up, what the Spanish call a DANA or gota fría, the warm sea feeds the clouds with moisture and they can drop enormous amounts of water in a few hours. That's why the autumn storms here can be something completely different from what we're used to back in Sweden.
Some perspective: in Sweden, SMHI calls it a cloudburst when 50 mm falls in one hour. The forecast here was up to 90 mm in an hour, and up to 160 mm in twelve hours. That's more than a third of what Mallorca normally gets in a whole year, in one night. After the summer the ground is dry and hard and doesn't take the water in, so it runs straight into the streets and the torrents, dry riverbeds that suddenly turn into rivers.
So next time you see a red warning for Mallorca, it isn't exaggerated. It means roughly the same as the phone screaming at you: stay inside.
Everyone here is fine. The palm tree is not. The mountains came back the next day.