The woman tapped her head and gestured to the shaded square where decades before, someone had the good sense to plant a protective border of sheltering trees.
Get under the trees, she warned, concerned for the health and sanity of the small group of red-faced, sweating foreigners squinting at street names through the glaring midday sun.
Gernika, so the tourist messages go, opens its heart to all visitors in peace and camaraderie.
For a Spanish town made tragically famous after being visited by one of the most brutal military campaigns of modern times, it is a message that means more than most marketing slogans.
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The woman, of an age to remember when the reconstruction of Gernika was still talked about, and certainly to recall the belated 1997 admission by Germany of its role in the town’s obliteration 60 years earlier, was relieved to hear the group were heading indoors to the nearby Peace Museum.
“Good, good,” she said, tapping her own head again and pointing to the sky with a long, phew to indicate that even as a local, she found the conditions difficult.
And well she might. The heatwave that engulfed Spain this past week was exceptional for the country as a whole but particularly extreme for the northern provinces.
These coastal regions normally have temperatures of 22 to 24 degrees at this time of year and rarely go beyond the high 20s, even in August.
The thermometer rising to 39 degrees locally and beyond 40 degrees in the neighbouring province was remarked upon repeatedly and often apologetically by shopkeepers and ice cream vendors.
Despite the growth in popularity of the Rosslare-Bilbao ferry route in recent years, and an increase in flight options, Spain’s coastal north sees relatively few northern European tourists and it would not like them to be scared off by unbearable temperatures and wildfire warnings.
Their own hopes of a holiday time boost to business were dented when activities over the five-day period when many towns and villages celebrate the feast of San Juan, or John the Baptist, had to be curtailed.
Bonfires traditionally mark the celebrations, but materials gathered in heaps in town squares and community fields in readiness stayed cordoned off this year, with public announcements declaring fires forbidden in the parched conditions.
But the real dismay was among the many visitors from Madrid and the country’s landlocked regions who come to the north to escape the increasingly oppressive summer heat further south.
Biking, hiking, all-day outings and swimming in pleasantly cool waters are activities denied them through much of the inland summer.
To be forced indoors again on their prized holidays felt desperately unfair.
It is a situation they may have to learn to accept, however. Although the conditions associated with this heatwave were still quite rare, they are becoming less so.
Between 1975 and 2000, Spain had just two heatwaves in June, El País reported. Between 2000 and 2025, there were 10 – a five-fold increase.
If that pattern is repeated between 2026 and 2050, then no year would escape an early heatwave and life would become very difficult indeed for much of the June-August period, with the likelihood that the severe heat would creep into May and September too.
The Peace Museum chronicles not just the atrocity inflicted on Gernika but peace movements around the world – footage from the signing of the Belfast Agreement features in one of the audio-visual displays.
It also explores the very concept of peace, what it means and what it takes to achieve and protect it.
One aspect featured is the necessity for a healthy planet and the understanding that for peace to thrive, so must nature and vice versa.
This is not a new ideology, it stresses, but one instinctively embraced by ancient peoples whose appreciation of the symbiotic relationship was arguably far more sophisticated than today’s.
“Some philosophies such as Stoicism, a Greek school of philosophy dating back to the 4th century BC, based the virtue of mankind on its ability to live in harmony with its surroundings,” a display reads.
“In modern times, the eco-pacificist movement defends peace as the only solution to prevent the destruction of the planet.
“Not only do they condemn the use of nuclear and biological weapons, but they also encourage reasonable consumption of our resources to prevent these from becoming depleted.”
Those resources include the carbon budget – the amount of greenhouse gas emissions Earth can tolerate before climate change accelerates beyond control.
It is now all but depleted despite warning after warning for decades that this time would come if steps were not taken to prevent it.
Those steps were not taken. How long will it be before a future visitor to Gernika is not advised by a compassionate passerby to take shelter from the heat, but is elbowed out of the way for a space beneath the trees?
