Europe Cannot Cope With This Heat
Thousands of schools across France (and elsewhere in Europe) have closed or changed hours, but others, also without air-conditioning, have remained open. The heat has disrupted train travel, spiked utility prices, and led to power blackouts for thousands in Brittany and in Italian cities such as Turin and Milan. French television showed throngs of people swimming in Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin, once notorious for its pollution.
- ▪Thousands of schools across France (and elsewhere in Europe) have closed or changed hours, but others, also without air-conditioning, have remained open.
- ▪The heat has disrupted train travel, spiked utility prices, and led to power blackouts for thousands in Brittany and in Italian cities such as Turin and Milan.
- ▪French television showed throngs of people swimming in Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin, once notorious for its pollution.
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PlanetEurope Cannot Cope With This Heat“It is just unbearable,” one Paris resident said.By Joshua PartlowThibaud Moritz / AFP / GettyJune 25, 2026, 8:19 AM ET ShareSave A summer escape to Paris, at least in the American mind, evokes a certain set of images: quiet strolls along the canals, long hours in bookstores and museums, a pleasant park bench, a glass of wine. Those pleasures are now contending with one of the most brutal and dangerous heat waves that Europe has faced in decades, a muggy, enervating stretch of weather that has forced millions of people across Europe, many of them in homes without air-conditioning and with few options for refuge, to endure triple-digit temperatures.Tourist icons of Paris—the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre—have been closing early.
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