‘Tragic scourge of drownings’: 40 die seeking relief in France’s record heat

Wednesday, 24 June 2026

France has recorded its hottest day ever, as an early heat wave grips Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries.

The country has recorded 40 fatalities from drowning in the past week as people seek relief in rivers and other bodies of water, despite authorities' warnings about unsupervised swimming.

Most of the people who drowned over the past week were young people, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said.

Among the deaths from drowning was a girl, 13, who had been cooling off in the river Seine at Fontaine-La Port, southwest of Paris, the BBC reported. It was understood she didn't know how to swim. A professional footballer was hospitalised after being rescued from a river near Lyon.

“There is a tragic scourge of drownings,” Lecornu said.

On Monday two children died after being left in a parked car amid the heat.

The punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts — like France — about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people - and were set to persist in many places.

The record of 29.8C for France’s national thermal indicator — an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations — was only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe's largest country.

Temperature records also tumbled at individual weather stations and on consecutive days in some towns as daytime highs climbed well above 40C, national weather service Meteo-France said.

The temperature climbed to 44.3C in Pissos in the country’s southwest, it said.

“Many cities experienced unprecedented values, regardless of the month, including 42.1C in Bordeaux,” Meteo-France posted on social media.

“Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year,” it said.

France's previous hottest days were recorded during heat waves of August 2003 and July 2019, with an average temperature of 29.4C.

In the French capital, Gin Dujardin said the heat forced him to halt his work fixing roofs, which in Paris often have galvanised zinc coverings.

“It’s very, very hard because the zinc is very hot. The welds don’t hold,” he said. “It’s Dubai temperatures. It’s impossible.”

“We’re experiencing an episode of exceptional intensity … Every day and every night, local and national temperature records are being broken,” Lecornu said.

Meteo-France said the heat wave has reached what it described as a “plateau of severity,” with unrelenting heat, day and night.

Further south, Spain faced a heat wave across parts of the Iberian Peninsula.

Spain’s national weather service, Aemet, issued red alerts Tuesday for temperatures of 44C in southern Andalusia as well as warnings of thermometers hitting 40C in the normally temperate Cantabria and the Basque Country regions along the country's northern Atlantic coast.

Heat to persist

A growing number of regions will tip into the red again Wednesday as the heat spreads across more than half of the country, including the northernmost tip of France, the weather service said.

The UK was also set to sizzle again, with temperatures set to close in on a 2022 record of 40.3C, the country’s Met Office said.

Human-caused climate change is tied to increasingly extreme weather, and UN climate agency projections say the next five years are likely to shatter more heat records.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Over the last four years, more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes, and most of those deaths were preventable, the World Health Organisation’s Europe office said this month.

The Louvre and the Eiffel Tower close early

In a country without widespread air conditioning, schools, public transportation and sporting events have been affected.

In Paris, the Eiffel Tower closed in the afternoon instead of late at night, as it usually does. The Louvre museum said it would close two hours earlier than normal from Wednesday through Saturday.

This heat wave, coming early in the summer, has already been compared to the August 2003 heat wave that roasted France with the highest temperatures in over half a century. It caused an estimated 15,000 deaths, many of them among older people in apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning.

UK red weather warnings issued over heat

Hundreds of British schools planned to close or close early this week because of the heat, while many train services were reduced to avoid heat-related problems on the rail lines.

The Met Office, the UK weather agency, issued a heat warning for Wednesday and Thursday, with forecasts suggesting June’s all-time daily temperature record could be broken.

The Met Office said the highest temperature on Tuesday was 34.6C Wisley Gardens in Surrey.

The peak of the heat wave is now forecast for Wednesday and Thursday, when highs could reach 39C in London or southern England.

“We are urging health and social care services across the country to ensure they are prepared,” Dr Agostinho Sousa, Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection at UK Health Security Agency said.

“It is vitally important that people understand the risk posed by high temperatures like these, and take steps to keep themselves and their friends, families and neighbours safe.”

Conditions are expected to ease by Friday, the Met Office said.

On Tuesday, multiple UK train operators, including the express train serving London Gatwick Airport, said they were canceling or reducing services. Railway operators urged people to travel only if 'absolutely necessary” on Wednesday and Thursday.

The heat dome: What’s behind the extreme weather

Experts say a phenomenon known as a heat dome is to blame for the record temperatures.

Heat domes are essentially high-pressure systems that remain stationary for a few days, trapping dangerous heat and humidity, said Mireia Ginesta, a research associate at the Climate Litigation Lab at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Heat domes result from a northward bulge in the jet stream — a river of fast-moving wind at high elevations — that creates the weather we experience.

Heat waves could become more frequent and longer

Aemet meteorologist Rubén del Campo said Spain, which has experienced increasingly torrid summers, is only going to get hotter because of climate change as heat waves become more frequent, longer and occur outside the traditional window of July and August.

Of the dozen heat waves Aemet has recorded in June since it started tracking them in 1975, half have occurred since 2015, del Campo said.

Human-driven climate change is heating up the atmosphere, both above Spain and in the surrounding sea waters, he said.

Copernicus, the EU weather monitoring agency, found that in Europe and globally, 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the continent experienced its second-highest number of “heat stress” days.

Scientists warn that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness, especially in southeastern Europe, making the region more vulnerable to health impacts and wildfires.

– AP with Stuff