Turns out Spain has storms that punch the ground.
A reventón (downburst) is a storm suddenly slamming a whole column of air straight down: minutes of hurricane-force wind out of nowhere, sometimes with a +10 °C temperature jump in the middle of the night. Air falling on you like a dropped piano, then gone.
The documented record for the entire country: 18 verified events between 1991 and 2026.
“18 in 35 years” sounds like a rarity until you spot the trick: 17 of the 18 are post-2013. Not because downbursts are new, but because AEMET’s SINOBAS registry only works since 2013, so almost everything before was filed as a generic “vendaval” and is now unrecoverable. If nobody writes it down, it never happened.
The highlights: Zaragoza airport 2018 (157 km/h, the best-studied Spanish case), Serra de Tramuntana 2020 (190 km/h, the absolute record), the Medusa Festival tragedy in Cullera 2022 (one death when the stage collapsed), and La Ribera 2026 (149 km/h, the strongest ever measured in an inhabited area).
The CSIC launched the DOWNBURST project (2024-2028) to build the missing climatology. Better late.
Full chronological table with sources in the raw research note.