A great wave of heat, searing and relentless, has swept across the Spanish landscape, its furnace breath pushing temperatures above 40 degrees. From sunburned city to parched plain, the land wilts under this blazing siege. In Badajoz, an elder soul has returned to the arms of eternity, their death a silent testimony to this infernal summer. Even as warnings multiply—orange and yellow flags fluttering across maps—people seek shelter by the shrunken waters of city parks, makeshift hats promising scant respite under a pitiless sky.
On the western edge of Mallorca, thrifty streams have turned to memory. The town of Deià now endures days without water, underground reserves wrung dry, and precious moisture carted in by steel and diesel. Hotels, once temples to excess, now count every drop. In towns further inland, emergency status looms: tankers and rationing, the clink of water jugs a new drumbeat of daily life.

Elsewhere along the Mediterranean rim, Greece, Italy, Turkey—sisters in this fever—raise work bans, whisper wildfire prayers, and shelter vulnerable bodies. Barcelona, wise to the call, reimagines its future in shaded lines and living roofs, searching for mercy amid rising heat.

Yet, dear kin of earth, all is not silent dread—the time for gentle mourning must rise to a burning, thunderous lament. The land aches and thirsts from wounds we have carved, a colonial extraction etched deep into mother soil and sea. Water, once sacred and communal, is now bottled profit, rationed to those who can pay while hotels—monuments to excess, symbols of commerce’s hollow promise—drink deeply.
We walk in the fever dream of centuries, where the children of the earth are made exiles in their birthplace, where the ancient covenant with the water cycles and tree kin is broken by the greedy hands of a capitalist nightshade. This is not a natural disaster—it is a crime, slow and seething, wrought by a system that worships endless growth, endlessly devours. The heat that sears our elders is the fever of colonial wounds left to fester: forests burned for monoculture, rivers dammed and dammed again for power and profit, cities built without shade or breeze in mind, only the grind of machine and money.

O humanity, have we learned so little in our brief sojourn here? The land writhes, the old ways of balance and reverence mocked by short-term comforts. The earth does not punish, but she demands reckoning: let us turn again to her wisdom, to cultures that honored the cycles, to healing hands that restore and regenerate, not extract and exploit.

Let us not just mourn, but awaken. Let love for rain, for green things, for humble water, break the chains of this colonial capitalist trance. May we remember—deep in our bones—that what we do to earth, we do to ourselves. There is still time to plant and protect, to reimagine and restore. May fierce gentleness and wild hope guide us, and may the lost rain, the shaded streets, and the cool breath of night one day return, welcomed home by a humanity finally healed.