Cuando hace calor, mi padre abre la ventana y yo bajo la persiana.

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Breakdown of Cuando hace calor, mi padre abre la ventana y yo bajo la persiana.

• mi: my
• cuando: when
• y: and

Questions & Answers about Cuando hace calor, mi padre abre la ventana y yo bajo la persiana.

What does cuando mean here: when or whenever?

Here it most naturally means when/whenever in a general, habitual sense.

Because the sentence uses the present tense, Cuando hace calor... often means something like:

Whenever it’s hot, my father opens the window and I lower the blind.

So it is not necessarily talking about one specific moment; it can describe a regular pattern.

Why does Spanish say hace calor instead of something like está caliente?

Hace calor is the normal Spanish weather expression for it’s hot.

Spanish often uses hacer + weather noun, for example:

• hace calor = it’s hot
• hace frío = it’s cold
• hace viento = it’s windy

Está caliente usually means it is hot/warm to the touch, for an object, food, drink, etc., not the weather in general.

So for weather, hace calor is the natural choice.

Why is it hace calor if hacer usually means to do or to make?

That is just one of the fixed uses of hacer in Spanish.

Although hacer often means to do/make, in weather expressions it works differently. In hace calor, it does not literally mean makes heat in normal English terms; it is simply the standard Spanish structure.

You can think of hace calor as a whole chunk to learn, rather than translating each word separately.