74-year-old Dutch heat record shattered: mercury rises to 39.3

Temperature readings in Eindhoven soared on Wednesday, hitting 39.3 degrees setting a new record for the hottest day ever recorded in the Netherlands. The old record was set in Warnsveld on August 23, 1944 with a temperature of 38.6 degrees.

More recently, the highest temperature for a July day in the Netherlands was previously measured in Maastricht on July 2, 2015 when the Limburg city sweated its way through a day topping out at 38.6 degrees.

Gilze-Rijen, the small Noord-Brabant municipality between Breda and Tilburg, was the first place to beat the previous records, where the temperature reached 39.1 degrees at 3 p.m., and then peaked at 39.2. The town made news earlier in the day when it initially set a new record for the hottest-ever July 24. At 12:10 p.m. it was already 36.1 degrees there, on a day when the previous record was 35.5 degrees. That record was also measured there in 1994, Weeronline reports.

The official day record in De Bilt - 34.1 degrees in 1994 - will almost certainly fall today, according to the weather service.