Power cuts hit three Almería tourist towns in one week as mayors demand grid investment

Air conditioning units have cut out mid-heatwave, tills have gone dark and hotel guests have been left without power during the busiest weeks of Almería’s tourist season. Now three town halls have demanded, within the space of a single week, that the region’s ageing electricity network finally gets the investment it deserves.

Three councils demanding change

Mojácar became the third Almería municipality in a week to publicly demand action on its electricity supply, after mayor Francisco García Cerdá said residents were tired of unpredictable cuts during the hottest months. “This is a basic service, and our residents need the reassurance that they can rely on it,” he said.

His comments followed almost identical warnings from Almería capital and Níjar just two days earlier, as heat and a seasonal surge in population across the province’s coastal towns pushed local grids to their limit.

Illegal connections and grid saturation blamed in the capital

In Almería capital, a summer of frequent outages in the Pescadería-La Chanca, Regiones, Ciudad Jardín and El Zapillo neighbourhoods has already produced an agreement between the town hall and Endesa for five new transformation centres to reinforce the network.

Councillor Eloísa Cabrera, who oversees urban planning and housing, said the council and Endesa were working intensively on a fix, with Endesa’s Almería manager Juan de la Cruz Molina taking part in the coordination meetings. Mayor María del Mar Vázquez said grid saturation and illegal connections to the network were behind much of the disruption, with the Subdelegación del Gobierno, the national government’s regional delegation, now coordinating action against unauthorised hook-ups. The agreement was expected to be formalised within days.

Níjar says the outages are ‘not isolated’

Níjar’s mayor, José Francisco Garrido, was much more blunt. He described the summer power cuts across villages including San José, Las Negras, Agua Amarga, Rodalquilar, Isleta del Moro, Campohermoso and Barranquete, much of it inside the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, as “not a one-off or isolated problem.” The council is demanding an emergency meeting with the companies and public bodies involved, a concrete timeline for reinforcing the network, and details of what has already been invested. Hotels, restaurants, shops and homes have all lost power repeatedly through the peak tourist weeks, in what Níjar’s town hall calls a recurring annual problem.

Why Almería’s grid keeps buckling in summer

Almería’s coastal towns swell with residents and tourists every summer, and the extra strain on air conditioning and cooling systems during heatwaves is a familiar trigger for outages across the province. The complaints also land in a country still sensitive about grid reliability, more than a year on from the blackout that knocked out power across Spain and Portugal in April 2025, later blamed by investigators on a perfect storm of technical failures.

Mojácar still waits for a plan while Almería’s deal nears sign-off

While Almería capital’s transformer agreement is expected to be formalised within days, Mojácar and Níjar have yet to receive timelines of their own. For a coastline that depends heavily on British and other foreign visitors through late summer, the three town halls are effectively asking whether the network can be trusted to keep the lights, and the air conditioning, on.