The Last Warm Night: How a City Says Goodbye to Its Summer Clock

SEVILLE — For four months the city has lived upside down, sleeping through the white glare of afternoon and waking when the pavement finally cooled. This week, with the first bearable daylight forecast within a fortnight, Seville threw the night one last party before returning it to the sun. In the Alameda they called it the Despedida del Calor — the farewell to the heat — and it ran, as everything runs here in summer, from eleven until the gray hour before dawn. Misting arches breathed over a crowd that mixed the augmented and the natural, the ninety-year-olds who remember when September was already cool and the children who have never known a livable afternoon. There was a melancholy under the joy that surprised the young and did not surprise the old. "You spend the summer resenting the night for being the only time you can live," said vendor Rocío Salas, packing her cart at four in the morning. "And then the season turns and you find you'll miss it. The dark was ours. The day we have to share."