Andalusia's regional government has put losses in this year's Muscat grape harvest in La Axarquía, a hilly district east of Málaga in southern Spain, at around 40 per cent and as much as 70 per cent in places. Growers had spent the previous week asking it to verify the damage.

The estimate appeared on 20 August in the first campaign report of the Observatorio de Precios y Mercados, the price and market observatory of the Junta de Andalucía's agriculture department. Successive August heatwaves and episodes of terral, a hot, dry inland wind, had caused "significant losses in the Axarquía's Muscat grape against expected production, estimated at around 40 per cent, though rising to as much as 70 per cent in some areas," the report said.

It named the worst-hit municipalities as Almáchar, El Borge, Moclinejo, Comares and Iznate, and attributed the damage to heat stress that had "reduced the weight and yield of the bunches."

Picking in the Axarquía began on 24 July, and growers say an official valuation has to be made while the fruit is still on the vine if it is to capture the damage. "Now that the harvest has started, it is the moment to check, definitively, how the heat stress has affected yields," said Francisco Moscoso, secretary general of the UPA Málaga farmers' union, on 18 August.

The white village of El Borge packed onto a hillside in Malaga province, ringed by small terraced plots of vines, olives and fruit trees on steep slopes

Growers raised the alarm through August. ASAJA Málaga, another farm union, first put losses at about 40 per cent on 13 August. "We are talking about initial estimates of losses that could be around 40 per cent, which is why it is essential to know the real extent of the damage as soon as possible," said its president, Baldomero Bellido.

UPA's own field estimate five days later reached 45 per cent on the worst farms, and found losses on all of them. "In barely two weeks we have gone from facing the campaign with reasonably good expectations to finding ourselves in a very worrying situation in many Axarquía vineyards," Moscoso said. "The continued heat has punished the vines hard and caused a very significant loss of water in the grape."

The highest figures came from Antonio Yuste, the mayor of Almáchar. Losses in his own village and three others had reached "up to 60 per cent of production" and "70 per cent" on some plots, he said in a statement reported by the regional daily Diario Sur on 19 August, after Axarquía mayors put the losses to the Socialist leadership in Andalusia and Málaga.

"We had a lot of hope of recovering what we lost last year, but this time it has been the heatwave that has punished production," he said. "Farmers are in a bad way and they are going to have a very bad time." Those numbers "still have to be verified through a technical assessment," the paper noted.

As of 24 August the regional agriculture department had made no public announcement of a damage assessment or of aid. The most recent step was a communiqué from the opposition Socialists, who said they would take the issue to the Andalusian parliament.

The crop those figures fall on is small and hand-worked. FAO's 2017 dossier for the district's agricultural heritage designation counted 1,016 growers registered with the regulatory council, farming 1,272 hectares split across 2,969 plots — an average holding of 0.43 hectares, with just 3 per cent of holdings above three hectares — on slopes that average 46 per cent where the raisin grapes grow.

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Their fruit is sun-dried on 4,593 paseros, the open-air stone floors of the district. La Axarquía and neighbouring Manilva together account for 99.5 per cent of Spain's raisin production, most of it in the Axarquía.

July 2026 was the hottest July in 87 years at all four ERA5 grid cells covering the affected villages, according to reanalysis data accessed via Cropli. The cell covering Almáchar, El Borge and Moclinejo reached a mean daily maximum of 34.95°C, more than 1.5°C past the record it set in 2023. It logged 22 days at or above 35°C between 1 July and 23 August, against a previous high of 14 in 2023, and peaked at 41.2°C.

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This was heat, not drought — the affliction more often associated with the Axarquía. Rainfall over the hydrological year to 23 August ran between 125 and 161 per cent of the 1991-2020 average at the four cells, among the wettest years since 1950. The damage came from the grapes dehydrating on the vine rather than from water stress in the soil, a mechanism the Consejo Regulador, the appellation's regulatory council, had itself flagged.

Its 30 July forecast of an "excellent" harvest had put the province back at 2,600 tonnes, about 30 per cent above the roughly 2,000 tonnes picked in 2025, and had already noted that late-July heat and terral were causing "a certain water stress".

The heat has now broken. The ensemble model of ECMWF, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, puts daily maxima at 27 to 29.5°C through 7 September, at or below the August normal, with almost no rain forecast, according to Open-Meteo data accessed via Cropli. That is benign for the rest of the harvest and for the open-air drying floors on which Málaga's raisins are made, and leaves the loss figure unlikely to worsen.

For the grapes that survived, the damage is compounding a commercial squeeze. UPA said private wineries were not taking the fruit because of the surplus of unsold wine, forcing growers to divert it to raisins for which it is not good enough. The Junta's report described the same problem in the neighbouring Granada denomination, where falling wine consumption "means wineries are reducing grape purchases" and "part of the crop is at risk of going unharvested."

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The raisin market that growers are being pushed toward is turning against them. EU raisin import prices fell to €2.81 a kilo in the first half of 2026 from €2.91 a year earlier, the first decline after four years of increases, on customs data accessed via Cropli. Spain is a structural raisin importer, buying 12,700 tonnes in 2025 against exports of just 1,500 tonnes.

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What the diverted crop is worth is unclear even to the government. Andalusia's observatory put the weighted average paid to growers across the region for Moscatel at €0.855 a kilo in 2025, up from €0.694 in 2024 — a rise it attributed to the small volume picked and the quality of the fruit, in what was nonetheless "a campaign of significant losses for the producing sector because of the drastic fall in yield".

For 2026 it could give no figure at all: the sources it consulted "refer to low prices at origin, but without providing specific quotations."