In Portugal, rural workers are harvesting grapes at night to escape extreme heat reaching temperatures of up to 40°C. Equipped with headlamps and pruning shears, they traverse total darkness to carry out the nighttime harvest, a practice that protects them from the increasingly suffocating heat of the Portuguese summer.
The 70-year-old rural worker Maria Jeronima Mendes explained that at night the climate is much cooler and that artificial light allows her to better see the grape bunches. She works on a rural property surrounded by lush vineyards.
Climate change is intensifying and prolonging periods of extreme heat and drought across Europe. The European Union's climate monitor reported that Western Europe experienced the hottest summer ever recorded, while August was the single hottest month ever recorded in the world.
This heat has forced southern European countries to adopt new strategies to protect workers and ensure agricultural production in the face of increasingly severe climate conditions.
