La gota fria

La gota fria*. How strange to describe a deluge as a cold drop, I thought when I first heard the term. Was it Spanish irony, or a lack of logic? My husband couldn’t clarify. He’s always lived in his head, not in the world outside.

We’d just moved back to Spain and I was cooking a spaghetti bolognese when its simmer sank to stillness in the saucepan. The butano had run out. No spare. No car to go and buy one. The rain pelting down, the wind howling. Desperate, we phoned a cousin, who came at once. Spanish families are like that. He drove us through a downpour from one garage to another. Sold out. Fear of the gota fria had caused a stampede.

At last, wet and weary, we found somewhere that had one. Back in the kitchen, the spag bol began to bubble again. That was when I remembered that the oven was electric. We could have used that and saved all the trouble.

Now, seven years later, the gota fria has struck again. Red alert throughout the province. Torrential storms, whole towns flooded, cars washed away, people drowned.

Our stretch of coast is in a wide open bay and relatively untouched. Dramatic lightning flashes and thunderclaps, winds whipping up the sand, rain lashing down, soaking into the parched ground, covering the salt marshes. Birds have come to drink again. Plants that were dying might flower next spring. The reservoirs, desperately low, might fill.

Nature has reclaimed the beach, so long tamed for tourists. Wild waves roll in, bringing debris from sea bed: stones and weeds, plastic buckets and bottles, polystyrene and fishing nets. The water sweeps away the board walks, digs channels that spread mud and sand over the promenade. Council machines and workers with spades begin to scrape it into huge piles.

On TV the meteorologists explain the phenomenon.

It occurs particularly in eastern Spain and the Balearic Islands, usually at the end of the summer, when a cold front from the north collides with warm, humid air coming in from the Med (26C in September), generating storms and torrential rainfall. Meteorologists use it as a popular term, because on their charts the cold air is shown as surrounded by closed isotherms, often in the shape of a drop.

*la gota = the drop/drip (noun) not to drop/ fall (verb)

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