Toledo month by month — at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
01 Fifty-three days
Key moments at a glance
18.4 °C mean, highs of 25.2 and 298 hours of sun, with the country still green.
22.1 °C, 20.7 mm and 273 hours of sun. The heat ends and the climb stops punishing.
A mean high of 34.5 °C over a stone old town with no trees. There is no shade to get into.
The data come from Spain's state meteorological agency, 1991–2020 normals. Annual precipitation totals 337.3 millimetres, the annual mean is 16.2 °C and sunshine runs to 3,014 hours a year. It is a textbook continentalised Mediterranean climate: dry, extreme and very bright.
Three thousand and fourteen hours of sunshine and a stone old town with barely any trees. Shade here comes from buildings, and only at certain hours.
02 Summer, seriously
July has a mean high of 35.1 °C and August 34.5. The series record is 44.2 °C, measured on 13 August 2021, and there are readings above 42 in June and July. In those two months relative humidity falls to 34% and 37%: dry heat, which deceives and dehydrates.
And it rains practically nothing: 5.7 millimetres in July and 8.6 in August, with one rain day in July and one and a half in August. July also totals 391 hours of sunshine, the year's highest, more than twelve a day.
Toledo's specific problem with that heat is topography. The old town sits on a hilltop and every street climbs or drops; walking here is not walking on the flat. At 35 degrees, a two-hundred-metre climb stops being a stroll.
03 Winter counts too
The other extreme surprises more, because nobody associates central Spain with hard cold. January has a mean of 6.8 °C and mean lows of 1.7, and the series record is −13.4 °C, measured on 12 January 2021. December and February have mean lows of 2.5 and 2.6.
And there is little light: December has 136 hours of sunshine and January 152, against July's 391. With December's relative humidity at 77%, the mornings are damp and cold in a way that does not match the idea one arrives with about Castile.
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04 The four good months
April, May, September and October. Those four and no others if you can choose. May has a mean of 18.4 °C, highs of 25.2 and 298 hours of sunshine: the year's best combination, with the surrounding country still green before it dries out.
September is close behind at a mean of 22.1 °C and 273 hours of sunshine, with the advantage of lower light, which suits a city of golden stone better than June's vertical sun. October drops to 16.6 but is the wettest month of the year — 48.7 millimetres over 6.5 days — which is still very little.
If you have to come in summer, do it the way it is done here: out first thing, indoors between one and six, and out again as the day falls. At 391 hours of sunshine in July, the city is not walked at midday; it is endured.
