Three minutes. That’s how long it took to wreck 500 metres of avenue.
Monday 20 July 2026, around half past six in the evening, in the middle of a storm: an esclafit (a downburst, reventón in Spanish) hit Avinguda del Carrilet in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, in the Santa Eulàlia neighbourhood. Gusts of up to about 90 km/h, some twenty trees down, streetlights, motorbikes on the ground, awnings ripped off, including a school’s. Nobody was hurt.
A downburst is a column of cold air dropping out of a storm cloud and spreading out in every direction when it hits the ground. Not a tornado: it doesn’t spin, it punches. Here, according to the Bombers, the recipe was weeks of heat (nights that didn’t go below 20 °C) plus the cold air dragged down by the rain. The mayor’s summary: it wasn’t forecast, there was no warning.
It’s one of the cases in Downbursts in Spain, where I explain why we have so few on record. And the same avenue went under water two months later: Catalonia’s storms, autumn 2026.
https://lhdigital.cat/noticies/una-mena-desclafit-afecta-lhospitalet-i-provoca-la-caiguda-darbres/