When It Rains, It Pours

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.

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.

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.