After 11 in the morning it is difficult to find people on the terraces. /
Commerce and hospitality receive public early and late in the day and activity on the street is reduced
“Now I don’t go out running after 10:30 in the morning, with this heat wave you have to be careful.” José Luis Borreguero is already on his way out at that hour, with his shirt soaked and a cap that he takes off to get some air while he talks practically nonstop. Extremadura is on red alert due to heat and people are barricading themselves in, minimizing the time they spend on the street and seeking, above all, the coolness of the morning. Bringing forward the necessary activities to the first hours of the day and inhabiting the refrigerated interior spaces are the only ways out against high temperatures. In reality there is little margin because the minimums do not give much respite either (22 degrees in Badajoz, 22 in Cáceres).
Athletes limit their activity first thing in the morning. /
“Around 11 or 11.30 am I try to be home collected, I’m going to walk a bit along the R-66, I leave around 8 or 8.30,” explains María Dolores Cuevas, 75, a Sevillian who has lived in Cáceres for more 40 years old. “I have air, I try to put a little because it is a horrible expense,” she says as she walks down Gómez Becerra street with two canes.
Commerce and hospitality especially suffer the damage caused by the alert. The terraces are no longer a good option during the central hours of the day. In the ‘Refranería’, a bar on the central Avenida de España in Cáceres, they say that part of their terrace, the one located on the pedestrian street San Pedro de Alcántara, is not on. “People don’t sit down because of the heat, until eight or eight-thirty in the afternoon there doesn’t start to be movement.” They open at half past eight in the morning, the time at which they receive the first people who go to breakfast. After ten o’clock there are already many more people inside than outside, explains waitress Soledad Miguel.
Isabel Lázaro runs ‘La Luna’, one of the oldest businesses of Gómez Becerra de Cáceres, an association of merchants that she chairs. “No one comes, at most early in the morning or late in the afternoon, but people are afraid, and the economic situation is added,” she explains. She says that the businesses on this street are considering changing their hours, opening from six in the evening and keeping their doors open until nine. “There has been talk of making a schedule like tomorrow, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., but it is difficult to carry it out, there are many workers who have that schedule and we would not leave them time to come to small stores to buy.”
Álvaro Tobías is a delivery man and maintains his usual schedule, in the afternoon he works from five to seven. /
There are jobs where changing the schedule cannot be considered. This is what happens to Álvaro Tobías, a delivery man. “I stop at 2:00 p.m., and then I work from five to seven, at five in the afternoon it’s deadly, at the moment we can’t change because a lot of merchandise keeps arriving and we don’t have time to survive, water.”
Sitting on a terrace is Paquita Godoy with her dog Pisco, who has a container of water for him to cool off. “I go out three times a day with my dog, I try not to be afraid because otherwise we are much more predisposed to being hot,” she says.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.