The Brief

Security guards and tourism guides at the Parthenon in Athens made headlines this summer when they went on strike during the scorching afternoons of a July heat wave that reached up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit in Greece.

“The extreme weather conditions continue to plague the country, despite this the Ministry of Culture did not take drastic measures — as it should have — to protect workers and visitors,” said the Panhellenic Union of Employees for the Guarding of Antiquities in a press release. The union stated that multiple people were seen fainting and suffering from heatstroke at the Acropolis, the complex of monuments that includes the Parthenon, prompting them to strike.

In fact, when the guards and guides refused to work during the hottest hours of the day, they essentially revived an old tradition in warm Mediterranean countries: the siesta.

About the siesta

A siesta consists of a midday break that usually includes a large meal and a nap and is most common in Southern European countries like Greece, Spain, and Italy. The siesta used to be sacred, but modern times have seen the decline of the practice.

“The siesta is as old as humanity, and in fact, it goes beyond humanity. And you can see a lot of other species just simply being sensible with hot weather,” said Dr. Simon Quilty, a physician and researcher at Australian National University in Canberra. Quilty is lead author on a paper that examines cultural responses to extreme heat.

Quilty also pointed out that the siesta has faced pushback in recent years, notably in 2016, when the Spanish prime minister proposed banning the practice. 

A street vendor of art prints takes a nap outside the Museo Del Prado in Madrid on Aug. 6 as the country braced for the third heat wave of the summer.

(

Oscar Del Pozo

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

“There’s a strong push back on that cultural institution,” said Quilty. “That reflects our values and our values over the last 15 to 20 years, and certainly over the last 50 years, [which] has increasingly become about money and material gain. And that is the culture that is destroying the environment.”

The word “siesta” evolved from the Latin phrase sexta hora, which means the sixth hour after dawn, a time when the sun is high and it’s best to take a break from extreme heat with a hearty meal and a nap.

Using siesta to avoid extreme heat

Climate change was a key force behind a summer that made history as the hottest on record. A new analysis from the nonprofit organization Climate Central found that 98% of people on Earth experienced hotter temperatures that were more likely because of climate change.

Even places that have not typically practiced the midday break are now looking to it after unflinching heat. In Germany, a famously efficient country, a public health group suggested that employers and workers get comfortable with the idea of preventing heat-related illnesses, including taking a siesta.

It could also be an effective option to avoid extreme heat in the United States, according to José María Martín Olalla, a professor of physics at the University of Seville in Spain.

“Practicing siesta in the United States is meaningful in the sense that you will be avoiding exposure to the central [hottest] hours of the day,” said Olalla.

Why cultural difference may be a barrier in U.S.

But there are numerous cultural differences between Spain and the U.S., especially when it comes to the workday. Olalla pointed out that the labor cycle differs immensely and so do mealtimes. Siestas function not only as a rest for what used to be mostly manual labor, but also exist as a designated time for a large family meal.

“For instance, in Spain, lunch is usually the main meal of the day,” said Olalla. “In [the] United States, lunch is kind of a smaller meal.”

The siesta is ubiquitous with the culture in Spain, even as urbanization has meant changes for how people take siestas. Siestas have recently declined in popularity: “Not every single Spaniard is practicing siesta,” said Olalla. Still, he said that extreme heat caused by climate change could spur a revival.

Temperatures globally are expected to keep rising, and so are heat deaths, according to a study from researchers at Texas A&M University. Researchers found that deaths could top 200,000 annually by the end of the century, a fivefold increase. A siesta could help curb some of those effects, particularly for outdoor workers, according to Mayra Reiter, program director of occupational safety and health at Farmworker Justice, an advocacy organization based in Washington D.C.

“Whether it’s a siesta or a cooldown break, workers need regular rest periods when they are working in the heat,” said Reiter. “Because otherwise, they face higher risk of accidents on the job, kidney damage from dehydration and overheating, and heatstroke, which can be deadly.”

What U.S. employers are trying

In the U.S., employers are already experimenting with different solutions to extreme heat. In the wake of the hottest summer on record, companies are deploying ice-filled vests, sweat stickers, and paid cooling breaks to offset the hotter temperatures that workers are exposed to. In the agriculture industry, which often requires hours of labor-intensive work to plant, grow, and harvest crops, farmworkers are harvesting plants at night to avoid high daytime temperatures.

Dr. Brenda Jacklitsch, a health scientist and heat expert at the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the Centers for Disease Control, backs the idea of a siesta for outdoor workers, especially those who are more exposed to extreme heat.

Construction workers are also at risk for mortality due to heat, and one mother of a construction worker who died last summer in Texas is suing his employer for $1 million. The mother believes the company could have providfed more safeguards against the heat and prevented his death.

“Hotter times of the day very often are, you know, middle of the afternoon, when the sun is right overhead,” said Jacklitsch. “And so being able to schedule some of the maybe most intense or the hardest work tasks for maybe the early morning hours or possibly even later in the evening or after it starts to cool down might be appropriate.”

One of the main ways that siestas could benefit outdoor workers is by helping regulate the core body temperature of workers. Siestas can help by reducing both internal and external sources of heat, according to Nathan Morris, an environmental physiologist and professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

The idea of working with, and not against, extreme heat might run counter to the culture of the United States, but Quilty brings up that Indigenous traditions and cultures in tropical regions have always understood the danger of extreme heat.

“People just simply understand that it’s dangerous to be in the hot weather,” he said.

How siesta relates to Indigenous practices

One of Quilty’s co-authors is Norman Frank Jurrurla, a Warumungu elder, who wrote about how traditional Indigenous practices are responsive to the environment. Siesta is one example of these environmentally sensitive practices; another is to pay attention to emerging drought conditions and shift to where more consistent water sources are.

One constraint of the study, though, is using historical data, which is limited in its reach, especially as climate change is pushing the world to temperatures too hot to survive.

It could be good to revive the tradition in the U.S., says Olalla, where overwork and sleep loss are regular parts of American culture that degrade people’s overall health.

“It’s pretty clear from our standard knowledge that siesta is good,” said Olalla.

So good that despite recent declines in Spaniards practicing siesta, Olalla still makes it a regular part of his schedule.

“By the way, your email finds me practicing siesta,” said Olalla in a video interview, in a testament to siesta’s enduring power.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.