The Galicia You Imagine Isn’t the Galicia You Might Move To

Ask most people what Galician weather is like and you’ll get some version of the same answer: green, mild, rainy, a bit like Ireland with better food. That reputation is accurate for a large part of the region, and it’s a big part of what draws people here in the first place. It is also, if you’re moving to somewhere near Ourense, close to useless as a prediction of what your actual summer will feel like.

Ourense has earned itself a nickname in the Spanish press that shows up every summer without fail: “el horno de Galicia,” the oven of Galicia. It’s not a metaphor stretched for a headline. In the summer of 2025 the city hit 42.9 degrees in June alone, a historic record for that month, and pushed past 40 degrees again in both July and August. Trade unions have filed formal complaints about hospital wards and health centres exceeding the legal maximum working temperature, and the regional government routinely issues red heat alerts for the province while the coast, an hour and a half away, sits comfortably under a grey sky and a light jacket.

The reason is straightforward once you look at a map rather than a tourist brochure. Ourense city sits in a river valley along the Miño, boxed in by hills that trap heat instead of letting it move through, and it’s shielded from the Atlantic influence that keeps the coastal provinces cool and damp for most of the year. A Coruña and Pontevedra get the ocean’s air conditioning. Ourense gets none of it, and in exchange gets summers that would not be out of place in Andalusia.

This matters more than it sounds like it should, because “Galicia” gets talked about, including by us, as a single climate. It isn’t. The coast is genuinely mild and wet, closer to what people picture when they hear the word Galicia. The interior, including a good stretch of the Ribeira Sacra, runs a real continental climate underneath its Atlantic label: cold, often frosty winters, and summers that can sit in the high thirties or low forties for days at a stretch. If your image of moving here is drizzle and jumpers year-round, and you end up an hour inland from the coast, you will be recalibrating that image fast, usually around the second heatwave of your first July.

None of this is a reason to avoid the interior. We live rurally ourselves and wouldn’t trade the trade-offs. But it is a reason to be specific, when you’re planning a move, about which Galicia you’re actually moving to. A house near Ourense and a house near Vigo can be an hour apart and have genuinely different climates, different heating and cooling needs, and a different relationship with summer altogether. Worth knowing before you sign anything, not after your first August.