Snow in Barcelona

The 14th of December 2001 will go down in my history as the first time I've seen snow in Barcelona. The previous few days had been cold, but crisp, with beautiful clear skies and red sunsets - one of the advantages of living in Spain is you don't suffer the extremely short days you get this time of year in the UK and it doesn't get dark until around 5:30 at the moment - but yesterday was different. When I looked out of the window the sky was grey and overcast and by midday there were sure signs that it was trying to snow.

Later on I heard that it was snowing quite heavily on Diagonal and when we watched the lunchtime news it was clear that the snowfall out of town had been quite severe. Girona is covered in a blanket of white, as are many other towns. There is even snow on the beaches of some coastal towns in the Costa Brava. The motorway between Girona and La Jonquera had been closed by the police at around two o'clock in the afternoon, stranding many cars departing for the coast and for the ski resorts at the weekend. We heard on the news twelve hours later that around 1,000 people were still stuck in that traffic - what a night they must have had.

To compound the chaos caused by the snow many parts of Barcelona had power cuts last night - we had about two hours of low and no voltage, with the computers crashing and electric lights barely on, but at least had candles. If we'd wanted to go anywhere we'd have had a problem as the Metro didn't work, and before we went to bed last night some parts of Barcelona still didn't have power. The irony of this situation was that the power companies had issued a statement saying that they were prepared for the expected cold weather.

After calls for compensation over the lack of electricity a spokesman said that if people wanted compensation prices would have to go up. But don't people want good service and not need compensation? Lets hope we don't suffer from it for too much longer.