Eight-hundred years of summer temperature variations in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula reconstructed from tree rings

July-to-October temperature variations are reconstructed for the last 800 years based on tree-ring widths from the Cazorla Range. Annual tree-ring width at this site has been found to be negatively correlated with temperature of the previous summer. This relationship is genuine, metabolically plausible, and cannot be explained as an indirect correlation mediated by hydroclimate. The resulting reconstruction (NCZTjaso) represents the southernmost annually resolved temperature record based on tree-rings in Europe and provides detailed information on the regional climate evolution during the Late Holocene in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula. The tree-ring based temperature reconstruction of Cazorla Range reveals predominantly warm summer temperatures during the transition between the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) from the 13th to the mid of the sixteenth century. The LIA spanned a slightly longer time (1500-1930 CE) than in other European summer temperature reconstructions from the Alps and Pyrenees. The twentieth century, though warmer than the preceding centuries, does not show unprecedented warmth in the last 800 years. Three ensembles of climate simulations conducted with two global atmosphereocean general circulation climate models (GCMs), considering different external forcings, were used for comparison: ECHO-G (Erik) and MPI-ESM (E1 and E2). Additionally, individual simulations were available from GCM included in the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, as well as single-forcing simulations performed with MPI-ESM. The comparison of the reconstructed and simulated temperatures revealed a close agreement of NCZTjaso with the simulations performed with total solar irradiance forcing with wider amplitude. Furthermore, the correlations with single-forcing simulations suggest volcanism as the main factor controlling preindustrial summer temperature variations in the Cazorla Range over the last five centuries. The persistent anti-correlation between NCZTjaso and simulated temperatures during the MCA-LIA transitional period underlines the current limitations for attributing temperature variations during that period to internal variability or external forcing.