Mobile phones across the Barcelona area will go off on Monday at 10 am during an emergency alert drill.
The test is part of the ES-Alert mobile phone warning system, used for emergencies such as flooding or wildfires.
Over 5 million people in the counties of Baix Llobregat, Barcelonès, Maresme, Vallès Occidental, and Vallès Oriental will receive the alarm.
Users will hear a loud sound and feel a vibration on their mobile phones. The alert will include the following message:
“Civil Protection alert test of the Catalan government. It’s a drill. Do not call 112. In a real emergency, you would receive instructions to protect yourself.”
The test will appear on all active phones in the designated area without users needing to change any settings or activate anything.
The message will be displayed in Catalan, Spanish, and English so that everyone in the area, including visitors, can understand it.
The system can reach everyone in the targeted area within five minutes while avoiding sending alerts to unaffected neighboring regions and reducing unnecessary panic.
After the test, authorities will provide a link to a survey so users can report whether they received the alert correctly.
The drill, originally scheduled for October 8 but delayed to November 3, was last conducted in this area in September 2023.
57 alerts sent in 2025
In recent months, Civil Protection has issued several real emergency alerts to mobile phones during actual emergency situations.
So far this year, 57 alerts have been sent, 44 of them for real emergencies.
Most of these alerts, 35 in total, were related to wildfires, while 7 were issued for floods and 2 for chemical accidents.
For instance, in July 2025, most people in Catalonia received a real alert warning of severe rainfall.
During that event, many users reported not receiving the alert and attributed the issue to certain phone operators.
Drills like today’s are intended to ensure that such problems do not happen during real emergencies.
To learn more about how the ES-Alert system works and Catalonia’s readiness to address emergencies, listen to this episode of Filling the Sink.
