In Spain, Farmworkers Are Dying in the Heat
Three migrant farmworkers died from heatstroke in Spain this summer. Largely ignored by media, their fate illustrates how the effects of the climate crisis are offloaded on the least visible workers.
Fruit pickers in Almonte, Huelva. (Courtesty of Eoghan Gilmartin)
On August 11, as temperatures soared above 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), Gheorghe Vranciu was on a ten-hour shift picking fruit near Lleida, Catalonia. By 2 p.m., the sixty-one-year-old Romanian had become overwhelmed by the heat — and asked to go home.
“[His supervisor’s] response was that he was just drunk, even though my father didn’t drink alcohol,” his son Ovidio told local media. “She then told him to go to the end of the row of fruit trees that they were harvesting and sit there in the shade. No one called an ambulance, no one took him home, and no one even notified us.”
Three hours later, he died of heatstroke still lying under the same tree, with the emergency services yet to arrive.
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