The Cold Truth About Winter on the Costa del Sol

The Sun is a Liar: A Game of Two Temperatures

The first thing you learn about a Spanish winter is that the sun is a complete and utter liar.

It will beam down from a perfect blue sky, making you think it's a glorious, warm day. You'll find a nice spot at a café, sit in a t-shirt soaking up the rays, and feel smug. In that bubble of direct sunlight, it can genuinely feel like it's 23°C.

Then you get up to leave. You take five steps into the shade cast by a building, and BAM. The temperature instantly plunges to what feels like 12°C. It’s a genuinely shocking drop. It's not just the lack of sun; any slight breeze, which you didn't even notice before, suddenly has an icy bite. To make matters worse, the thick walls of the buildings, having been in shadow, are radiating cold—acting just like the "ice walls" inside the house.

The only way to win this constant game of temperature-hopscotch is to dress like an onion. Layering isn't just a suggestion; it's a survival strategy. My go-to setup is a simple t-shirt, a zip-up fleece, and, most importantly, a lightweight windproof jacket. Forget big, heavy winter coats; they're mostly useless here. Think flexible, think layers.

But the battle with the cold doesn't stop when you go indoors. In fact, it often gets worse.

The "Cold Box" Paradox: A Real-World Example

You might think a well-built, modernised house would be immune to the cold. Let me use my own place as a perfect case study of why that's not always true in Spain.

Our home is a modest, 100-square-metre end-of-row townhouse, about 4km inland at an elevation of 100m. It has incredibly thick stone walls, ranging from 50 to 100cm. I also invested a small fortune in the best windows and doors I could find: Climalit Planitherm 4S glass, which are superb for both thermal and sound insulation. We've also got heating in every room, and good heating too, not an electric plug in radiator.

So, it should be a cosy refuge in winter, right? Wrong. It's still freezing.

The problem is that those thick, uninsulated walls, which are a godsend in summer, act like giant, dense blocks of ice throughout the winter. You can run the reverse-cycle air conditioning to warm up the air in a room, but the moment you turn it off, you can feel the cold seeping back out of the stone. It's a constant, expensive battle against the sheer thermal mass of the building itself.

Of course, the glorious payback for this winter chill comes in August. When it's a blistering 40°C outside, those same icy walls and high-spec windows keep the inside of the house wonderfully cool. Spanish houses aren't badly designed; they're just designed for a different war. ☀️

Renting for the Winter? Choose Your "Cold Box" Wisely

This brings me to some crucial advice for those looking to escape the UK and Irish winters by renting a place here for a few months. Choosing the right type of rental is the difference between a cosy escape and a shivering endurance test.

The temptation is the holiday villa with its own pool. Forget it. The pool will be arctic, and many villas are built with a single skin of hollow brick, making them impossible to keep warm. Likewise, a quaint townhouse can suffer from the same "ice wall" problem as my own place.

The unlikely hero for a winter rental is the humble apartment. You get a massive amount of "free" insulation from the other occupied apartments above, below, and on either side of you. Plus, modern apartment blocks are far more likely to have some form of efficient central heating. The obvious downside is noisy neighbours, but let's be realistic: this is Spain, everywhere is noisy. My advice? Get some earplugs.

The Final Shocker: Your Winter Electricity Bill

This all leads to the final, painful reality. Trying to heat a poorly insulated Spanish home with reverse-cycle air conditioning and electric radiators is like trying to heat your garden with a hairdryer. The heat escapes almost as fast as you can produce it.

Don't be surprised to see winter electricity bills for a modest apartment hitting €100, €200, or even more per month if you try to keep the place constantly warm. It is a significant and often unexpected cost.

This is why you can't just rely on brute-force heating. The only way to survive comfortably and affordably is to combine everything: wear your fleece indoors, use throws on the sofa, cover your floors with rugs, run a dehumidifier, and only heat the single room you're actually in.

So, come for the winter sun by all means. Just don't forget your slippers and a healthy respect for your electricity meter.