Alex Trelinski
A SUNNY Christmas holiday weekend has been predicted by forecasters for the Costa del Sol, but without the unseasonably high temperatures recorded earlier this month.
A large anticyclone will dominate the weather across Malaga province with no rain and temperatures possibly exceeding 20 degrees on Christmas Day on some parts of the coast, according to the State Meteorological Agency(Aemet).
For Christmas Eve, sunny skies will predominate, with some cloudy intervals on the coast, with temperatures similar to those recorded this week.
The maximums, which in general will be between 16 and 19 degrees, may get above 20 degrees in coastal areas of Malaga province- especially on the west coast.
During the evening and night, minimums will range between 7 and 10 degrees on the coast, and inland, a chillier 2 to 5 degrees.
On Christmas Eve, temperatures between 7am and 6pm in Malaga, Marbella, and Velez-Malaga will be between 10 and 18 degrees, while Ronda and Antequera are forecast to range between 4 and 16 degrees.
For Christmas Day, a couple of extra degrees are predicted for for municipalities such as Velez-Malaga, Torremolinos, Rincon de la Victoria, Estepona and Manilva, although the change will not be massively noticeable.
As the days tick down towards the end of the year, 2023 will go down as the driest and warmest in Malaga province for six decades as the area remains in a long-term drought.
The autumn which ended in late November was particularly dry and is the tenth with the least rainfall collected since 1961- the year in which modern records began.
Rainfall in September, October and November was at 71.8 square metres per litre ‘which is 34% of what is usually normal’, according to Jesus Riesco, head of Aemet in Malaga.
“It can be classified as a very dry autumn,” added Riesco, noting that the autumn in which the least rain fell in the province was 1981, with 19.7 litres per square metre.
“We are coming from a very dry year and we are in a period of long-term drought,” he observed.
He described the ‘extremely warm autumn temperatures as very significant’.
The average, says Riesco, has been 19.1 degrees, which is 1.6 degrees above the normal average temperature in the reference period, between 1991-2020.
“It’s been an extremely warm autumn, it’s the third warmest autumn in the province since 1961,” he concluded.
