December 2022. It has been raining all night long in Algés, a town just to the west of Lisbon, Portugal. A gray morning dawns, and it seems to be an ordinary one. But something is not quite right. Although it is a weekday, everything is suspiciously quiet: no sounds of traffic, whether distant or far; no excited cacophony of teenage voices, of students hurrying to the nearby high school. Looking out the window, I no longer see the streets below. Instead, there are rivers with very fast currents, carrying cars as if they were feather-light paper boats. 

It is not “business as usual,” by any stretch of the imagination. A woman who had lived in a small basement apartment in the old center of Algés drowned at home when water rose all the way up to her bedroom’s ceiling in the course of the night, leaving her without the time and the chance to evacuate. Nearby stores lost their stock to the floods and the underground access to the train station was filled with five meters of water.