Blackout cuts power to 50,000 on Spain's La Palma island

More than 50,000 electricity customers on Spain's Canary Island of La Palma lost power early Monday after torrential rain and a lightning strike battered the island's infrastructure and triggered a cascade of failures at key facilities, authorities said.

Lightning strike triggers cascade failure

The blackout began at 6:42 am local time when the island's power system failed completely, according to the Canary Islands government. A lightning strike had hit an electrical substation around 4 am, sparking a fire that damaged medium- and low-voltage lines, national grid operator Red Electrica said. Although crews initially restored service following the substation fire, a subsequent failure at the Los Guinchos power plant caused the island-wide outage that plunged thousands into darkness.

By midmorning — roughly four and a half hours after the blackout began — power had returned to approximately 75% of affected customers, Red Electrica stated in an update. Critical infrastructure including the island's port, airport, General Hospital and Hospital de Dolores maintained operations using backup generators throughout the disruption, officials noted.

Torrential rain causes landslides and flooding

The regional government issued its highest rainfall alert for eastern La Palma at 2 am as the storm intensified rapidly. Emergency services recorded 62 millimeters of rain in a single hour and 138 millimeters over a 12-hour period, triggering landslides and prompting firefighters to respond to a storm-related house fire. Spanish broadcaster Cadena SER reported that damage was less severe than authorities had initially anticipated, though an orange alert for heavy rainfall remained in effect until Tuesday morning.

Previous mainland blackout recalled

The Canary Islands escaped the massive April 2025 blackout that left mainland Spain and Portugal without electricity for approximately 10 hours, isolating La Palma from that earlier crisis. A European expert panel concluded in March that the April outage resulted from multiple factors including failures in voltage control that caused generators to disconnect in succession across the peninsula.