Spain's Burning Classrooms: Children Left to Swelter as Climate Crisis Hits Education
Near Barcelona, primary school children splash water on each other in the late morning heat, their classrooms growing unbearable. Inside the Patufet Sant Jordi public school in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, temperatures climb past 29 degrees Celsius on a June day just before the end of term. A sensor installed in a classroom confirms what every child and teacher already feels in their bones. The heat has arrived, and it is not leaving.
What is the 'Burning Classrooms' project?
The sensor is part of a grassroots monitoring project called 'Aules que cremen', Catalan for 'Burning Classrooms'. It tracks heat conditions across schools in the northeastern region of Catalonia. Created by teachers, the project has installed low-cost sensors in nearly 300 schools, creating a live map of classroom temperatures. The system, built using simple materials available in school technology workshops, feeds data into an online platform that has become a reference point for teacher complaints about overheating classrooms.
'We already knew the evidence, but now it is written down,' said Octavi Enrech, a developer who co-created the platform with Pau Sanchez, a secondary school technology teacher. Enrech called it 'unthinkable' that classrooms reach temperatures of 35C. Sanchez pointed to a glaring inequality in the law. 'There is labour legislation that sets healthy conditions for adult workers, but there is no law regulating conditions for children,' he said.
How does extreme heat affect children's learning?
At Patufet Sant Jordi, a school with around 450 pupils, the heat is no longer an occasional discomfort but a growing barrier to learning. The school relies on ceiling fans funded years ago by parents' associations. Staff say they are no longer enough as hot periods at the start and end of the academic year grow longer and more intense.
'We're having a lot of heat, and it affects everything in our daily life with the children,' said Marta Abril, a teacher at the school. Students regularly complain of headaches after recess. 'So you have to remind them to wet their heads before playing, to wet their heads again during recess, and to wet their heads once more before coming up to the classroom.'
Why are Spanish schools so unprepared for rising temperatures?
Spain is considered a frontline region for climate change, experiencing increasingly long heatwaves that sometimes start before summer, along with more frequent episodes of intense rainfall. The last four years have been the country's warmest since records began in 1961, according to national weather agency AEMET.
'We are in what is sometimes called a hot spot, a region especially sensitive to warming,' said Javier Martín Vide, emeritus professor of physical geography at the University of Barcelona.
Nearly half the school buildings in Catalonia were built before 2000 and have 'significant deficits' in energy efficiency and thermal comfort, according to a study by Catalan education policy group Equitat.org. The failure is structural. Public infrastructure has not kept pace with the changing climate, and those who bear the consequences are the youngest and most vulnerable.
Are authorities doing enough to cool down schools?
Across Spain, parents in Madrid have filed complaints with the national ombudsman over the lack of air conditioning in schools. Teacher unions in Valencia have complained about baking classrooms. Local and regional governments have announced investment plans to adapt schools to rising temperatures, but progress is uneven.
Among the most ambitious initiatives is a programme in Barcelona, where 54 schools have been fitted with air conditioning, with work underway in 30 more. City authorities plan to invest around 100 million euros, funded through a tourist tax, to equip all of Barcelona's roughly 140 primary schools, as well as 30 other education centres, by 2030.
In Andalusia, the southern region that frequently endures some of Spain's most intense summer heat, around one-third of schools have air conditioning, according to daily newspaper El Pais.
Martín Vide offered a sobering prediction. The authorities 'will likely react sharply and quickly' when a child suffers heatstroke, he said. 'We are already on the brink of it happening.'
What does this mean for Europe's climate future?
There is a quiet injustice unfolding in the classrooms of Catalonia, and it resonates far beyond Spain. When the state fails to protect its children from the consequences of a warming world, it reveals a profound question of priorities. Adult workers have legal protections against extreme heat. Children, compelled by law to attend school, do not. The tourist tax in Barcelona offers one model of funding, but it cannot be the only answer. What is needed is a European commitment to climate adaptation that treats public infrastructure, and the wellbeing of those who depend on it, as non-negotiable. The sensors in Catalonia's classrooms have recorded the numbers. The question now is whether anyone with the power to act is listening.