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# When It Rains, It Pours
- URL: https://the-second-home.ghost.io/when-it-rains-it-pours/
- Published: 2026-10-03T17:00:23.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-03T17:00:23.000Z
- Author: Barbara Orzel

Barcelona is very good at making you forget about rain.

Weeks can pass without anything more serious than a few drops. In summer, rain can feel almost theoretical: something appearing in the weather app, possibly accompanied by a tiny cloud icon, while outside the pavement continues to bake.

And then it rains.

Properly.

Yesterday, after hours of water coming down, Apple Weather was still describing the situation as *drizzle*. Somewhere below, a man was crossing the street with a plastic bag held over his head.

I think the street had the better description.

Rain here can become an event remarkably quickly. Not necessarily because it lasts for weeks, but because when a serious downpour arrives, there can be an extraordinary amount of water in a very short time.

An umbrella helps until it does not. Wind, water bouncing back from the pavement, soaked shoes, trousers wet from the knees down — at some point the umbrella starts to feel less like protection and more like a small personal roof with serious structural limitations.

This is also why one of the more useful things I have bought in Barcelona is a genuinely waterproof jacket.

It has a waterproof rating of around 20,000 mm — a number I never expected to have an opinion about. I originally thought it would be most useful on trips somewhere famously wet. I took it to the Azores, for example.

Barcelona has tested it much more thoroughly.

There is something slightly absurd about owning serious rain gear in a city so strongly associated with heat and sun. But after a few proper Mediterranean downpours, the logic becomes obvious.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/10/IMG_6154.jpeg)

Even the balcony tells the story.

A few hours of rain and the terracotta tiles become a shallow reflective surface, drops hitting water that is already there. The scale is tiny compared with flooded streets, but perhaps that is precisely why I like the image: the same weather event that reorganises traffic and sends people running for shelter is also happening quietly on a few square metres outside the living room.

And apparently, this is not over yet.

According to the forecast, the next few days are supposed to bring considerably more rain.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/10/IMG_6179.jpeg)

There is a version of Barcelona built almost entirely out of sunlight.

And then there is the one where somebody walks down the street with a plastic bag on his head and you start taking waterproof ratings very seriously.