PARASOLES TRADED FOR BROLLIES by Philip Avery
“Lovely, long, warm days can be enjoyed whilst lying by the pool in any of the Canary Islands during the summer months making the islands a hugely popular choice for sun-seeking Brits.”
Extracts from a holiday brochure, like the one above became a distant dream to the holidaymakers currently on the Islands. Sun seekers woke to an unpleasant surprise on Thursday morning as rain lashed their balconies and soaked the sun loungers, leaving thousands of people stuck in their hotels during the morning deluge.
Many of you will have visited there in the past or may have known people that have gone there in the summer and talked of the beautiful weather they experienced. Yes, normally the weather for the archipelago of islands is very nice during the summer months with plenty of sunshine and, to be honest, very little rain indeed. In a typical year, rainfall for the islands, a few hundred millimetres, which some parts of the northwest of Scotland get in just one month. For the month of August, which is the peak season for holidaymakers, the average rainfall varies between 8mm and 0.3mm across the Canaries, which is a mere sprinkling.
The Canaries consist of seven large and six smaller islands based in the Atlantic Ocean some 100km off the North West coast of Africa (Morocco and Western Sahara).
On the small island of Tenerife, described as a tropical paradise, full of palm trees and banana plantations and with breathtaking scenery, rain drizzled down all morning. The Paradise Island received 12mm of rain in six hours, which is more than double their monthly average of 5.2mm.
Fuerteventura is the furthest east of the islands and is well known for its long white sandy beaches and is another holiday hotspot with thousands of hours of sunshine a year. The sun definitely went into hiding on Thursday as the clouds swept in and squeezed out 32mm of rain in the course of the morning, which, astonishingly, is 80 times their monthly average!
If you are heading off to the Canaries in the coming few days, you’ll be happy to know that the mass of cloud which brought the rain has now moved northwestwards and things are looking a lot more like summer by this weekend.
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