Spanish resort engulfed by whiteness! Torrevieja has disappeared from the map like in a Stephen King horror movie

**It only took a few minutes for Spain's sunny Costa Blanca to turn into the setting of a dark thriller. Yesterday afternoon, a thick, impenetrable fog invaded Torrevieja, reducing visibility to just three meters. Your street, the lighthouse, even the neighbor across the street - everything dissolved into a thick, London-like smog in an ocean of white. Was nature trying to tell us something?

What happened yesterday was no ordinary change in the weather. Torrevieja experienced a spectacular cloud invasion. Beginning in the early afternoon, a massive wall of fog began creeping inland from La Mata beach. Instead of sunshine and the sound of waves, the city was overwhelmed by overpowering humidity, a sudden drop in temperature and the smell of salt wafting through the air that could almost be sliced with a knife. For a few hours, Torrevieja became a Mediterranean London, albeit one devoid of the Thames.

Nature in cinema mode

While the apocalyptic landscape certainly caused a faster heartbeat for drivers trying to find their way home, for local photographers it was a true gift from the heavens:

Joaquín Carrión captured on accelerated footage the moment when the cloud, with an almost elegant calm, but merciless, devours quarters of the city.
Juan Carlos García rose above the chaos and, from the perspective of a flight attendant, showed Torrevieja as a magical "sea of clouds" from which only the tallest buildings protruded.
Local experts from Proyecto Mastral took on the role of guides in the dark, monitoring the situation minute by minute and appealing for maximum caution behind the wheel.

The truth hiding in the mist

Understandably, the sudden disappearance of one's own city under a dense shroud raises concern. However, it is worth looking at the phenomenon through the lens of hard science to allay irrational fears. The phenomenon that hit Torrevieja (and other Alicante coastal cities) yesterday is nothing more than advection fog (Spanish: niebla de advección).

The mechanism of formation is simple, although the effect is frightening:

Relatively warm and moist air masses are moving over a cooler surface - in this case, over the still-cooled waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
Moisture in the air rapidly condenses, forming low-slung, extremely dense clouds just above the surface of the water.
Favorable gentle winds push this mass just a few hundred meters inland, paralyzing the coastal zone.

Irony of fate with a thrill As the city throbbed with an unsettling silence, and the fog thickened with each passing hour engulfing the night, the Spanish TV channel "Be Mad" decided to broadcast the film *"The Mist" based on Stephen King's famous novel. The timing could hardly be better - or worse. More than one viewer certainly glanced anxiously out the window, making sure that no supernatural beasts were lurking in the fumes.

Fortunately, the only intruder that took over Torrevieja yesterday was silence and humidity. Nature has proven that it doesn't need million-dollar special effects to transform a Spanish paradise into a mystery capital in a matter of minutes. And all this without having to buy a plane ticket to the British Isles.