Levante y poniente
The levante came and brought with it the heavy heat. Levante refers to the winds from the east, and in Spanish levantar means rise up, and literally it is like the sun that rises in the east. But interestingly enough the levante has nothing to do with rising up, it is more like laid out. We have been lazying around here until yesterday we couldn’t take it and went to the beach despite the fact that the levante brings these hot winds that causes the sand to rise up as well. But the Atlantic was frigid cold and helped reinvigorate us.
The other wind pattern here is the poniente – again – a misnomer because it refers to the setting of the sun because the winds come from the West, but actually it cools things down so much – we had poniente when we arrived here and it doesn’t make you want to set, it makes you actually rise up.
If I ran the world or at least the winds from the Straits of Gibraltar – I would switch these terms in a second.