Watch: Sky turns deadly over Tarragona as thousands of pigeons are caught in hailstorm

Thousands of pigeons flock to Tarragona’s port every day to feed on spilled grain, but Monday’s storm turned the spot into a death trap. Hailstones more than five centimetres wide left close to 100 birds dead among flooded streets, fallen trees and suspended trains.

Giant hail turned the pigeons’ daily feeding routine deadly

Every day, thousands of pigeons make the short flight from Tarragona’s old town to its working port, drawn by grain that spills from the agro-industrial terminals during loading and unloading. On Monday August 24, that routine put them directly in the path of a storm cell that dropped hailstones more than five centimetres across onto the Camp de Tarragona (the area surrounding the city) in about 20 minutes. By the time the hail stopped, close to 100 pigeons lay dead around the port. The death toll has been described by other outlets as running into the hundreds, though that higher figure has not yet been confirmed by officials.

@yani1994.r

Una intensa tormenta azotó este lunes Tarragona, en Cataluña, España, con lluvias torrenciales, granizo y fuertes ráfagas de viento que provocaron inundaciones en calles, caída de árboles y ramas y daños en distintos sectores. Los Bomberos de la Generalitat atendieron 162 avisos en una hora, 141 de ellos en la provincia de Tarragona, mientras que el servicio de emergencias 112 recibió 373 llamadas relacionadas con el temporal. En algunos puntos se registraron más de 20 litros por metro cuadrado en apenas 30 minutos.

♬ sonido original – Yani

No injuries to people were reported at the port itself, but the same storm did bring chaos across the wider city.

Why so many birds were gathered in one place when the hail struck

The port’s role as an unofficial feeding ground is well documented. A study carried out for Tarragona council and the Autoritat Portuària de Tarragona (the Tarragona Port Authority) found that between 2,850 and 3,950 pigeons make the flight from the city to the port every day, feeding on grain spilled in the terminals, rest areas and unloading zones over a three-hour window.

A citywide census in 2022 counted about 15,783 pigeons in Tarragona overall, and the council has spent close to €400,000 a year over the past eight years cleaning up droppings caused largely by the port’s overspill population. The Port Authority approved new measures in July aimed at cutting the birds’ access to grain and easing the overcrowding, but Monday’s storm arrived before any of it could take effect.

Flooded streets and suspended trains as the storm tore through Tarragona

The hail was only part of the damage. Tarragona city recorded 77.4 millimetres of rain in two hours, including 34 millimetres in a single half hour, while nearby Vinyols i els Arcs-Cambrils saw 88.8 millimetres. Wind gusts reached 117 kilometres an hour at Lac Redon.

Carrer Apodaca….@tarragonaradio pic.twitter.com/gA782NusEj

— JMC 🚐 (@JMC1886_) August 24, 2026

Streets around El Serrallo and the Polígon Francolí flooded, trees came down across the city and blocked lanes on the AP-7 and N-340, and emergency services logged close to 150 weather-related calls by the evening. Rodalies (Cataluña’s regional rail network) suspended services on the R14, R15 and RT-1 lines between Móra la Nova and Reus, before returning to normal later that day.

The second serious storm to hit the province in a week

Monday’s storm was not an isolated event. Just two days earlier, in the early hours of Saturday August 22, flooding near El Vendrell and Roda de Berà, further along the coast, injured 11 people, one of them critically, and forced about 400 people to evacuate a campsite and a nightclub.

Tarragona province has spent much of August under some form of weather alert, as an unusually deep low-pressure system for the time of year has repeatedly pushed unstable air across Cataluña.

The same stormy spell spawned a tornado in France 

The instability was not confined to Spain. On the same Monday afternoon, a tornado tore through the Aude department in southern France, near Carcassonne, ripping roofs from homes and forcing organisers to cancel a stage of the Vuelta a España after hail and high winds hit the cycling race.

Twenty-two French departments were placed on orange alert for storms, underlining how widely the same unsettled pattern was being felt across the western Mediterranean.