Summer in Spain is a sensory experience — long evenings, outdoor dining, the warm smell of stone warmed by the sun. But in recent years, the heat has crossed from pleasant to punishing. And with another warm season ahead, knowing where to find shade is no longer a trivial convenience. It's a genuine quality-of-life skill.

Enter Shadowmap: a 3D interactive sun and shadow map that tells you, to the minute, exactly where shade will fall — anywhere in the world.

Spain Is Getting Hotter. That's Just the Data.

Spain has always been warm, but the trend is undeniable. Summer 2025 was one of the two hottest on record, nearly matching 2022 — currently the warmest summer in Spanish history. The most intense heatwave of 2025, which struck in August, lasted sixteen days with temperatures averaging 4.6°C above the historical norm — the highest anomaly ever registered. In Zamora, an all-time August record of 41.1°C was set. Spain's national weather agency AEMET noted that nine of the ten hottest summers in the country have all occurred this century.

The good news for 2026? Forecasters suggest summer heat may arrive a little later than usual — closer to mid-June rather than May — which gives residents and visitors a somewhat gentler start to the season. Still, once Spanish summer gets going, it gets going.

The broader picture is worth understanding without alarm: climate science projects that by mid-century, typical Mediterranean summers will be around 2°C warmer than the 1981–2020 baseline. The summers of 2022 and 2025 are already comparable to those mid-century projections. That means learning to live smartly with heat isn't just a summer hack — it's an increasingly important life skill.

Cities Are Hotter Than the Countryside — By Design

Even on a moderately hot day, Spanish cities can feel significantly warmer than the surrounding countryside. This is the urban heat island effect: a product of concrete, asphalt, dense buildings, and insufficient tree cover that traps heat and radiates it back long into the night.

Cities like Madrid, Seville, Zaragoza, Valencia, and Barcelona become particularly intense during peak summer. Narrow streets that might have been designed for shade in medieval times now sit in neighbourhoods where trees are too few and pavement dominates. In cities without enough green space or dedicated cool zones, residents can find themselves with very limited refuge during the hottest hours of the day — typically between noon and 6pm.

Finding shade in these environments isn't always as simple as "stand under a tree." The geometry of sun and shadow in a dense urban grid is surprisingly complex. Which side of the street will be shaded at 4pm on a Wednesday in July? Is that terrace you're considering for lunch going to be in full sun by the time the food arrives? These are the questions Shadowmap was built to answer.

What Is Shadowmap?

Shadowmap is an Austrian startup founded in 2021 that uses real-world 3D building, terrain and tree data to simulate sunlight and shadow at any location, on any date, at any time of day. Think of it as a "Google Maps for sunlight and shade" — a live, interactive map that overlays shadow patterns onto city streets, parks, squares, and individual buildings.

Using it is straightforward: enter a city or specific address, select a date and time using the on-screen sliders, and watch shadow patterns appear across the map in near-real time. The app is available on the web at shadowmap.org, as well as on iPhone and iPad via iOS.

Five Ways Shadowmap Is Useful in Spain and Portugal

1. Planning Your Day Out

This is the most immediately practical use. Before heading out to a park, a market, or a city walk, check Shadowmap to identify which routes stay shaded. In cities like Seville or Valencia, where direct sun at 2pm in July is genuinely dangerous for vulnerable people, a five-minute check can make the difference between a pleasant outing and an ordeal. You can plan your route to stay on the shaded side of the street the entire time — or at least identify where the shaded benches and café terraces are.

2. Finding the Right Terrace or Café

Spain's café culture is built around the terrace, but not all terraces are created equal. A spot that's delightfully shaded at 7pm in June might be in direct sun by 8pm. With Shadowmap, you can check in advance whether a specific terrace will be shaded during the time you plan to arrive — and choose accordingly. This is especially useful when you're in an unfamiliar city or neighbourhood.

3. Choosing Where to Live — More Comfortably and Affordably

This is perhaps the most undervalued use of Shadowmap in the Spanish context, and it can save you real money. When browsing apartments or houses, most listings tell you which direction the property faces — but they rarely tell you the full story of sun exposure throughout the day and across the seasons.

With Shadowmap, you can place a marker on any building and scrub through the hours of a summer's day to see exactly how the sun hits it. An apartment that gets only morning sun and sits in shade by early afternoon is going to stay significantly cooler throughout summer — meaning less reliance on air conditioning and meaningfully lower electricity bills. Conversely, a flat facing west with no shading from nearby buildings will absorb heat through the afternoon and bake well into the evening.

For renters and buyers in Spain and Portugal, where summer energy costs are rising alongside temperatures, this kind of pre-purchase or pre-rental analysis can influence a decision that affects both comfort and monthly outgoings for years.

4. Outdoor Activities, Sports, and Leisure

Cyclists, runners, dog walkers, parents with young children — anyone spending time outside benefits from knowing when and where shade is available. Shadowmap lets you identify which park paths are shaded in the morning versus the afternoon, which sports pitches have natural shade, or where to position yourself at an outdoor event. It's also a favourite tool among photographers and filmmakers, who use it to identify when specific facades, plazas, or landscapes will be lit with soft, diffuse light rather than harsh direct sun.

5. Solar Panel Planning

If you're thinking about installing solar panels — increasingly common in Spain given both the sunshine and the energy costs — Shadowmap helps identify which rooftops and orientations receive the most continuous solar exposure throughout the year. It can also highlight which areas are shaded by neighbouring buildings, preventing under-investment in solar infrastructure.

Free to Use, With Premium Features Available

Shadowmap's core functionality — viewing real-time shadows and moving through the hours of the current day — is completely free. Everyday users can access the app directly in any browser or iPhone without creating an account.

Premium features, available through monthly or annual Home and Studio subscriptions, unlock additional tools including the ability to plan across the year, access more detailed solar analysis data, and use advanced functions useful for home hunting, solar panel planning and professional applications in architecture, real estate, and urban planning.

A Small Tool for a Large Problem

Shadowmap won't solve the urban heat island problem. That will require more trees, better urban design, greener architecture, and smarter city planning — conversations that are already underway across Spanish cities, with varying degrees of urgency.

But while cities and policymakers catch up, tools like Shadowmap offer something quietly powerful: the ability to make better decisions, day by day and street by street, in a landscape that is becoming meaningfully hotter. Whether you're choosing a morning run route in Madrid, hunting for a shaded apartment in Valencia, or looking for the coolest terrace in Seville on a July evening, knowing where the shadows fall is knowledge worth having.

Try it at shadowmap.org — no installation required.