Jean-Pierre Farandou grew up in the sunbaked southwest of France, north of the Pyrénées mountain range, which divides France from Spain. His grandparents, he recalls, were farmers who rose to work in the cool predawn hours and rested in the heat of the day, the French equivalent of a Spanish siesta.
So, when Mr. Farandou, now France’s labor minister, was searching for ways to respond to the heat waves that have recently scorched France, he instinctively cast his eye toward Spain. Mr. Farandou contacted his Spanish counterpart, Yolanda Díaz, and proposed a field trip to Madrid, the capital, to explore how Spain has adapted to its torrid climate.
“France is discovering that in summer, it will become Spain,” Mr. Farandou, 69, said in a recent interview. “It is a country that resembles us,” he added. “We know that Spain works, even when it’s hot.”
In September, when the French government’s need to respond to heat waves will presumably have eased, Mr. Farandou and his small delegation will spend a few days in Spain, talking to government officials, business executives, union leaders, academics and ordinary people. The goal is to understand how Spaniards organize their society to cope with frequent spells of extreme heat.
Some of the measures are obvious and already being tried in France: shifting work hours to earlier in the day, particularly for outdoor or manual workers; frequent rests, which help people recover from sleep lost during heat waves; and an emphasis on drinking fluids.
Spain also provides paid leave during climate-related disruptions, though it adopted that after disastrous floods in Valencia in 2024 rather than because of heat waves. In France, the Green Party recently proposed five days a year of paid vacation to protect workers during extreme heat, an idea that drew headlines even if stands little chance of becoming law.
France and Spain share another climate-related scourge: wildfires. On Thursday, tens of thousands of people were evacuated after fires spread across both countries. In France, vacationers were forced to flee threatened campsites along the Atlantic coast in the southwest. In Spain, the authorities declared a national emergency in a region near Madrid, where several fires burned out of control.
To Mr. Farandou, Spain’s culture is as intriguing as its laws. Spanish habits of daily life — from midday siestas to late-night dinners — reflect a long history of living with heat. Transplanting those cultural adaptations to France, particularly the country’s north, would be tricky, he acknowledged.
“Adapting through regulations is one thing, but the real, major challenge is cultural adaptation,” said Mr. Farandou, a businessman who ran France’s national railway, S.N.C.F., before joining the government last year.
In seeking to change habits, experts say, France is looking for low-cost solutions to an expensive problem. Behavioral changes are cheaper than major investments in infrastructure, such as the widespread installation of air-conditioning and “net zero” policies, which seek to reduce the carbon emissions that are the main culprit for a warming climate.
“Acting on our time schedules, things like that — they don’t cost a penny,” said Sonia Lavadinho, an urban anthropologist in Bern, Switzerland. “You can understand why a government would like to implement these changes.”
But Spanish habits, other experts warn, should not be viewed as a magic bullet. For one, traditional Spanish customs, like the siesta or earlier workday, are neither ubiquitous nor available to the people most vulnerable to heat: agricultural laborers, construction workers, delivery people and cleaners.
Moreover, Spain still struggles to protect its population. Roughly one in three Spanish households are unable to keep their homes adequately cool in summer, said Christian Oltra, a senior researcher at the Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research, a government-affiliated think tank in Madrid.
“Spain can be genuinely more accustomed to heat than its neighbors and still carry a very substantial health burden,” Mr. Oltra said. “The most accurate description, in my view, is that Spain is partially and unevenly adapted — a valuable case to learn from, rather than a straightforward success story.”
However imperfect, Mr. Farandou said, Spain was better weatherproofed than France. He noted that many French administrative arrangements dated to the Napoleonic era and were singularly ill suited to a hotter climate.
While August is a vacation month, for example, when many flee stifling cities for cooler climes, June is typically hectic, packed with school exams, sports tournaments and construction projects. This year, all that activity coincided with the most intense June heat wave on record.
The French health authorities recorded nearly 6,000 excess deaths from June 17 to July 2, a period when the temperatures rose above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Desperate for relief, thousands of people jumped into canals, rivers and other waterways, leading to 90 deaths.
Mr. Farandou suggested that local authorities keep pools open at night so families could use them after school and work. Schools, he said, should move up exams, though even that might not help, given that France’s first heat wave this year occurred in late May.
At workplaces that require a dress code, such as government ministries, he said he supported allowing employees to go without ties, jackets or long trousers in hot weather. The British, he noted, devised Bermuda shorts a century ago to make life bearable for officials working in tropical and desert climates.
Architecture is another area where Spain offers lessons. Its older houses have thick walls and narrow windows with shutters, blinds and awnings to block the sun. Many French houses have shutters, too, though in modern apartments, large windows are prized. In Paris, the familiar zinc roofs that cover almost four-fifths of the buildings sizzle under the sun, making life unbearable for those who live underneath them.
The most obvious change, of course, would be to install air-conditioning. In Spain’s hottest regions, Mr. Oltra said, three-quarters of the houses use cooling systems. But in France, as in other northern European countries, air-conditioning is a political lightning rod. Critics note that it worsens climate change by using lots of electricity and pumping hot air outside the buildings it cools.
Mr. Farandou, who began his career at an American mining company in Denver, said he favored installing cooling systems in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and other places with vulnerable people. But he said that American-style air-conditioning was not a solution that would work in France.
It is not an accident that Mr. Farandou is visiting Spain instead of the United States, Asia or the Middle East, where many buildings are also heavily air-conditioned. Those places are too distant, culturally and geographically, to be useful models for France, he said. Even trying to live more like their Spanish neighbors will be a stretch for the French, he said, though they will have little choice.
“Deep down, I have this conviction,” Mr. Farandou said: The French people “will have to change something relatively profound in order to adapt in adapt to these very long periods of intense heat.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
