Outdoor work in southern Europe's sweltering tourist hot spots is becoming hellish

Cruel heat is baking southern Europe as the continent slips deeper into summer.

In homes and offices, air conditioning is sweet relief. But under the scorching sun, outdoor labor can be grueling, brutal, occasionally even deadly.

A street sweeper died in Barcelona during a heat wave last month and, according to a labor union, 12 other city cleaners have suffered heatstroke since. Some of Europe's powerful unions are pushing for tougher regulations to protect the aging workforce from climate change on the world's fastest-warming continent.

Hundreds of street cleaners and concerned citizens marched through downtown Barcelona last week to protest the death of Montse Aguilar, a 51-year-old street cleaner who worked even as the city's temperatures hit a June record.

Fellow street sweeper Antonia Rodríguez said at the protest that blistering summers have made her work “unbearable.”

“I have been doing this job for 23 years and each year the heat is worse,” said Rodríguez, 56. “Something has to be done.”

Extreme heat has fueled more than 1,000 excess deaths in Spain so far in June and July, according to the Carlos III Health Institute.

“Climate change is, above all, playing a role in extreme weather events like the heat waves we are experiencing, and is having a big impact in our country,” said Diana Gómez, who heads the institute’s daily mortality observatory.

Even before the march, Barcelona’s City Hall issued new rules requiring the four companies contracted to clean its streets to give workers uniforms made of breathable material, a hat and sun cream. When temperatures reach 34 C (93 F), street cleaners now must have hourly water breaks and routes that allow time in the shade. Cleaning work will be suspended when temperatures hit 40 C (104 F).

Protesters said none of the clothing changes have been put into effect and workers are punished for allegedly slacking in the heat. They said supervisors would sanction workers when they took breaks or slowed down.

Workers marched behind a banner reading “Extreme Heat Is Also Workplace Violence!" and demanded better summer clothing and more breaks during the sweltering summers. They complained that they have to buy their own water.

FCC Medio Ambiente, the company that employed the deceased worker, declined to comment on the protesters' complaints. In a previous statement, it offered its condolences to Aguilar's family and said that it trains its staff to work in hot weather.

In Greece, regulations for outdoor labor such as construction work and food delivery includes mandatory breaks. Employers are also advised — but not mandated — to adjust shifts to keep workers out of the midday sun.

Greece requires heat-safety inspections during hotter months but the country's largest labor union, the GSEE, is calling for year-round monitoring.

European labor unions and the United Nations’ International Labor Organization are also pushing for a more coordinated international approach to handling the impact of rising temperatures on workers.

"Heat stress is an invisible killer,” the ILO said in a report last year on how heat hurts workers.

It called for countries to increase worker heat protections, saying Europe and Central Asia have experienced the largest spike in excessive worker heat exposure this century.

In Athens, grill cook Thomas Siamandas shaves meat from a spit in the threshold of the famed Bairaktaris Restaurant. He is out of the sun, but the 38 C (100.4 F) temperature recorded on July 16 was even tougher to endure while standing in front of souvlaki burners.

Grill cooks step into air-conditioned rooms when possible and always keep water within reach. Working with a fan pointed at his feet, the 32-year-old said staying cool means knowing when to take a break, before the heat overwhelms you.

“It’s tough, but we take precautions: We sit down when we can, take frequent breaks and stay hydrated. We drink plenty of water — really a lot,” said Siamandas, who has worked at the restaurant for eight years. “You have to find a way to adjust to the conditions.”

Massimo De Filippis spends hours in the blazing sun each day sharing the history of vestal virgins, dueling gladiators and powerful emperors as tourists shuffle through Rome’s Colosseum and Forum.

“Honestly, it is tough. I am not going to lie,” the 45-year-old De Filippis said as he wiped sweat from his face. “Many times it is actually dangerous to go into the Roman Forum between noon and 3:30 p.m.”

At midday on July 22, he led his group down the Forum’s Via Sacra, the central road in ancient Rome. They paused at a fountain to rinse their faces and fill their bottles.

Dehydrated tourists often pass out here in the summer heat, said Francesca Duimich, who represents 300 Roman tour guides in Italy’s national federation, Federagit.

“The Forum is a pit; There is no shade, there is no wind,” Duimich said. “Being there at 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. in the summer heat means you will feel unwell.”

This year, guides have bombarded her with complaints about the heat. In recent weeks, Federagit requested that the state’s Colosseum Archaeological Park, which oversees the Forum, open an hour earlier so tours can get a jump-start before the heat becomes punishing. The request has been to no avail, so far.

The park’s press office said that administrators are working to move the opening up by 30 minutes and will soon schedule visits after sunset.

Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain, Gatopoulos from Athens and Thomas from Rome.

Tourists use use fans and sun hats as they visit the Forum in Rome on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Tourists use umbrellas to shelter from the heat as they line up for a tour of the Forum in Rome, on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Grill cook Thomas Siamandas makes traditional souvlaki in a restaurant in the central Monastiraki district during a hot day in Athens on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

FILE - Street cleaner Raúl Rodriguez rests during a protest over the death of fellow cleaner during a recent heat wave in Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, July 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra, File)

FILE - People march in Barcelona to protest the death of street cleaner Montse Aguilar during a recent heat wave in Spain, Wednesday, July 16, 2025. The banner in Spanish reads, “Extreme Heat is also Workplace Violence. Justice for Montse." (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra, File)

LONDON (AP) — With one puff of a cigarette, a woman in Canada became a global symbol of defiance against Iran's bloody crackdown on dissent — and the world saw the flame.

A video that has gone viral in recent days shows the woman — who described herself as an Iranian refugee — snapping open a lighter and setting the flame to a photo she holds. It ignites, illuminating the visage of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest cleric. Then the woman dips a cigarette into the glow, takes a quick drag — and lets what remains of the image fall to the pavement.

Whether staged or a spontaneous act of defiance — and there’s plenty of debate — the video has become one of the defining images of the protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, as U.S. President Donald Trump considers military action in the country again.

The gesture has jumped from the virtual world to the real one, with opponents of the regime lighting cigarettes on photos of the ayatollah from Israel to Germany and Switzerland to the United States.

In the 34 seconds of footage, many across platforms like X, Instagram and Reddit saw one person defy a series of the theocracy’s laws and norms in a riveting act of autonomy. She wears no hijab, three years after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests against the regime’s required headscarves.

She burns an image of Iran’s supreme leader, a crime in the Islamic republic punishable by death. Her curly hair cascades — yet another transgression in the Iranian government’s eyes. She lights a cigarette from the flame — a gesture considered immodest in Iran.

And in those few seconds, circulated and amplified a million times over, she steps into history.

In 2026, social media is a central battleground for narrative control over conflicts. Protesters in Iran say the unrest is a demonstration against the regime’s strictures and competence. Iran has long cast it as a plot by outsiders like United States and Israel to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

And both sides are racing to tell the story of it that will endure.

Iranian state media announces wave after wave of arrests by authorities, targeting those it calls “terrorists” and also apparently looking for Starlink satellite internet dishes, the only way to get videos and images out to the internet. There was evidence on Thursday that the regime’s bloody crackdown had somewhat smothered the dissent after activists said it had killed at least 2,615 people. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the mayhem of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Social media has bloomed with photos of people lighting cigarettes from photos of Iran’s leader. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em. #Iran,” posted Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.

In the age of AI, misinformation and disinformation, there’s abundant reason to question emotionally and politically charged images. So when “the cigarette girl” appeared online this month, plenty of users did just that.

It wasn’t immediately clear, for example, whether she was lighting up inside Iran or somewhere with free-speech protections as a sign of solidarity. Some spotted a background that seemed to be in Canada. She confirmed that in interviews. But did her collar line up correctly? Was the flame realistic? Would a real woman let her hair get so close to the fire?

Many wondered: Is the “cigarette girl” an example of “psyops?” That, too, is unclear. That’s a feature of warfare and statecraft as old as human conflict, in which an image or sound is deliberately disseminated by someone with a stake in the outcome. From the allies’ fake radio broadcasts during World War II to the Cold War’s nuclear missile parades, history is rich with examples.

The U.S. Army doesn’t even hide it. The 4th Psychological Operations Group out of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina last year released a recruitment video called, “Ghost in the Machine 2 that’s peppered with references to “PSYWAR.”And the Gaza war featured a ferocious battle of optics: Hamas forced Israeli hostages to publicly smile and pose before being released, and Israel broadcast their jubilant reunions with family and friends.

Whatever the answer, the symbolism of the Iranian woman's act was powerful enough to rocket around the world on social media — and inspire people at real-life protests to copy it.

The woman did not respond to multiple efforts by The Associated Press to confirm her identity. But she has spoken to other outlets, and AP confirmed the authenticity of those interviews.

On X, she calls herself a “radical feminist” and uses the handle Morticia Addams —- after the exuberantly creepy matriarch of “The Addams Family” — sheerly out of her interest in “spooky things,” the woman said in an interview with the nonprofit outlet The Objective.

She doesn’t allow her real name to be published for safety reasons after what she describes as a harrowing journey from being a dissident in Iran — where she says she was arrested and abused — to safety in Turkey. There, she told The Objective, she obtained a student visa for Canada. Now, in her mid-20s, she said she has refugee status in and lives in Toronto.

It was there, on Jan. 7, that she filmed what’s become known as “the cigarette girl” video a day before the Iranian regime imposed a near-total internet blackout.

“I just wanted to tell my friends that my heart, my soul was with them,” she said in an interview on CNN-News18, a network affiliate in India.

In the interviews, the woman said she was arrested for the first time at 17 during the “bloody November” protests of 2019, demonstrations that erupted after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal that Iran had struck with world powers that imposed crushing sanctions.

“I was strongly opposed to the Islamic regime,” she told The Objective. Security forces “arrested me with tasers and batons. I spent a night in a detention center without my family knowing where I was or what had happened to me.” Her family eventually secured her release by offering a pay slip for bail. “I was under surveillance from that moment on.”

In 2022 during the protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, she said she participated in a YouTube program opposing the mandatory hijab and began receiving calls from blocked numbers threatening her. In 2024, after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, she shared her story about it — and was arrested in her home in Isfahan.

The woman said she was questioned and “subjected to severe humiliation and physical abuse.” Then without explanation, she was released on a high bail. She fled to Turkey and began her journey to Canada and, eventually, global notoriety.

“All my family members are still in Iran, and I haven’t heard from them in a few days,” she said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’m truly worried that the Islamic regime might attack them.”

A demonstrator lights a cigarette with a burning poster depicting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a rally in support of Iran's anti-government protests, in Holon, Israel Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

CORRECTS MONTH - A protester lights a cigarette off a burning poster of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a demonstration in Berlin, Germany, in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran against the government, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

A protester burns an image of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a cigarette during rally in support of the nationwide mass demonstrations in Iran against the government, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026 in Zuerich, Switzerland.(Michael Buholzer /Keystone via AP)