Weather Station

Very dull & even dark for much of the day today. I thought we had had some very light showers of rain this morning but when I left the house at 10.30am to go downtown, to get another bag of compost & buy a few odd things, I discovered that the reason for the ground appearing to be wet but without any visible rain was due to the fact that from time to time we were getting outbreaks of very fine drizzle. It's not really visible but soon clouds up your glasses!

Haven't seen a glimpse of sunshine in at least 2 days just the same dull, cloudy weather though yesterday there was no rain, not even this super fine misty drizzle of today. Temps have maintained the average of between 12-15C for the last few days with nighttime mins around 8-10C. Wind, what wind??? No noticeable changes are expected over the weekend at least.

Our family in Spain only suffered light impacts due to the torrential rain on Tuesday night. Though a cousin of my wife's in a small town in the Valencia region, next to a small river they call locally "The Dry River", because it seldom carries any water, overflowed its banks & caused flooding in their house. But she & her family are fine. 

My sister-in-law told us the thunderstorms in Cuenca just kept on & on till about 3am. She wasn't able to get any sleep till they finally passed. She lives in the Old City so was in no danger of flooding. Her house in 100s of metres (feet) above the little river she can see from her house. Like the "Dry River" this one seldom carries much water. Our son, who also lives in Cuenca as well, told us he had never seen so much rain & such strong thunderstorms in his entre life, (48 years), 40 odd years living in Cuenca. 

These "Gota Frias", as the Spanish call them, happen most years during September or October. In fact there was one just a few weeks after I first arrived in Cuenca in 1972. I was 22 at the time & well accustomed to the rain - or so I thought! But the "Gota Fria" we had made me feel quite afraid! I'd never seen such a huge amount of rain fall so heavily in a such a short space of time. As Cuenca is quite hilly some of the really old neighbourhoods are build on the slopes of the hills around the more central areas of the city. My house was in one of them but it looked over another one in front. There is practically no soil & it's almost all exposed rocks so the rain has nowhere to go & just pours off the rock into the town below. Or at least it would do except that behind my house there were some gigantic steps, or at least they looked that way to me. But when the torrential rain started I soon discovered that this "Giant's Causeway" was actually a sort of drain, a run-off area to direct the torrential rain into the little river which very quickly turned into a foaming, roaring monster!!!

The water in this smaller river eventually joins another very much bigger river & they join & then make their way downhill until the main river runs into the Mediterranean Sea not far from Valencia city. The bigger river is normally green but when it floods it turns chocolate brown. So when the smaller rivers enters it it crosses 3/4 of the bigger rivers width till it is turned in the direction the other river is running in. But, until they cross a weir about a 1/4 of a mile later, you can see the different colour stream the water from the smaller river makes! They don't mix until they cross the weir. I have photos I've taken of these happenings over many of the years we lived in Cuenca.