Pupils and teachers are being forced to endure suffocating classrooms and playground temperatures approaching 40°C, while some sports surfaces have soared beyond 50°C.
The final weeks of the school year are becoming a brutal endurance test in Alicante.
With exams still to sit, lessons still to finish and pupils expected to remain focused at their desks, extreme heat is already turning schools and institutes into ovens. Classrooms are sweltering, playgrounds are baking under the sun and teachers are struggling to continue lessons in conditions increasingly described as intolerable.
A new Greenpeace report has placed Alicante firmly on the map of Spain’s school heat crisis, warning that educational buildings are dangerously unprepared for the temperatures now arriving before the summer holidays even begin.
Alicante school records playground temperatures near 40°C
Greenpeace visited a secondary school in Benissa this week as part of its investigation into extreme heat in Spanish education centres.
By midday, temperatures inside the classrooms were already close to the day’s outdoor maximum of 28°C. Outside, the situation was even more alarming.
Temperatures in the playground approached 40°C, while some exposed sports surfaces exceeded 50°C.
These are spaces where children are still expected to study, exercise, socialise and complete the final stretch of the academic year.
Across Alicante province, including schools in the Vega Baja, families and teaching staff have repeatedly warned of pupils sitting through lessons drenched in sweat, using sheets of paper as makeshift fans and searching desperately for the smallest patch of shade during break times.
The heat no longer waits for summer
Greenpeace’s report, Red Hot: The Danger of Heat in Spanish Classrooms, warns that intense summer temperatures are arriving earlier and increasingly affecting May and June.
These are not empty holiday months. They are among the most demanding weeks of the school calendar, with final exams, assessments, unfinished syllabuses and end-of-year activities still taking place.
Yet many school buildings were designed for a climate that no longer exists.
Heat becomes trapped inside classrooms where pupils and teachers remain for hours at a time. Greenpeace warns that prolonged exposure can affect physical well-being, concentration and the ability to learn.
For thousands of children, the school day is no longer simply tiring. It is becoming a test of how much heat their bodies can withstand.
Alicante at the centre of a national crisis
The environmental organisation used thermal imaging to document conditions in schools across five provinces: Alicante, Barcelona, Madrid, Ourense and Seville.
The images reveal that extreme temperatures are not merely an uncomfortable inconvenience. They are disrupting everyday school life both inside classrooms and in outdoor areas.
Many playgrounds remain dominated by cement, asphalt and concrete, with little vegetation and almost no effective shade.
At the same time, public health advice recommends avoiding direct sunlight and strenuous physical activity during the hottest hours of the day.
Children, however, are still being sent into playgrounds and sports courts where the ground itself can reach temperatures above 50°C.
“Conditions we would never accept for ourselves”
The Greenpeace report also includes testimony from parents who say society has begun to normalise unacceptable conditions for children.
Ana Martínez, a mother and member of the parents’ association at a public school in north-west Madrid, described the situation in stark terms.
“It breaks my heart to see how we have normalised conditions for our children that we would never accept for ourselves,” she said.
She described children spending hours sweating over their desks and fanning themselves with anything they could find, while teachers attempted to continue lessons in suffocating classrooms.
Outside, pupils crowded beneath the narrow shadow cast by a basketball hoop because there were no trees or properly shaded areas where they could escape the sun.
The scenes described in the report echo complaints already being made by families and educators across Alicante province.
Opening a window will not stop the crisis
Greenpeace argues that schools cannot continue relying on improvised survival measures.
Opening windows, lowering blinds, allowing lighter clothing or handing out paper fans may provide momentary relief, but they do not solve the underlying problem.
In some cases, opening windows simply allows even hotter air to enter the classroom.
The organisation says the response must be structural and properly funded. Its proposals include improving insulation, installing efficient low-carbon cooling systems, creating shaded areas and transforming concrete playgrounds through trees, plants and other natural cooling measures.
School buildings must be adapted to withstand the climate conditions pupils and teachers are already experiencing, not those of decades ago.
Greenpeace demands urgent action
Greenpeace is calling for coordinated action from local, regional and national authorities, backed by sufficient public funding.
The organisation says bureaucracy, administrative disputes and a lack of resources can no longer be used as excuses while children and teachers are required to remain in buildings that fail to provide basic thermal comfort and safety.
In Alicante, the warning is already impossible to ignore.
The summer holidays may be approaching, but inside many classrooms the summer heat has already arrived — and the school year is ending in hell.
