The southern coast of France enjoys the definitive Mediterranean climate, a recipe which provides probably the most amenable conditions to be found anywhere in the world. It was aptly summed up by the writer Tobias Smollett, who lived in Nice for several years in the 1760s: "Such is the serenity of the air, that you see nothing above your head for several months together but a charming blue expanse, without a cloud or speck; whatever clouds may be formed by evaporation from the sea, they seldom or never hover over this small territory."
But there is no overall shortage of rainfall. As it happens, Nice, with an average rainfall of more than 800 millimetres a year, has more rain than Dublin. The difference lies in the nature of the rain: in the south of France the rain is heavy while it lasts, but is infrequent, while in Ireland the rain is often light but it is more persistent. Moreover, near the Mediterranean virtually all the rain falls in the winter half of the year; the summers, give or take a thunderstorm or two, are dry and almost cloudless.
Smollett again provides more detail: "The rainy time," he writes, "is about the autumnal equinox, or rather something later. The heavy rains generally come with a south-west wind which was the creberque procellis Africus, Africa, prolific in its storms, of the ancients. It is here called the Lebeche, a corruption of Lybicus, "from Lybia"; it rolls the Mediterranean before it in huge waves and blows before it all the clouds which have formed above the sea."
Mediterranean winters, however, are very mild, and the summers are hot as well as dry: the coldest month has an average temperature in excess of five degrees - unusual on continental Europe - and the average July temperature exceeds 20 degrees.
The third characteristic of a Mediterranean climate is the great amount of sunshine it implies - well over 2,000 hours a year. The skies are clear and blue for most of the summer, and far less cloudy even in winter than the skies of northern Europe: the week-long palls of cloud, so common here, are rarely seen.
Other areas of the world enjoy a very similar regime, and by association their climates are described as "Mediterranean". Notable among them are the coast of California in the US, the south-west corner of Australia, the area around Cape Town in South Africa, and parts of central Chile. Indeed it is sometimes claimed that parts of the extreme south-west of Ireland enjoy a Mediterranean climate, but the evidence, particularly that provided by statistics of the sunshine, is not at all convincing.