Wave climate in the Western Mediterranean is presented through the calibration of an update wind wave hindcast spanning the period 1958–2008. The hindcast was obtained with the WAM model (spatial resolution of 1/6°) forced with wind fields from the atmospheric model ARPERA. Significant wave heights (SWH) provided by the hindcast were calibrated using buoy observations with the aim of improving the characterization of the wave climate over the region. The methodology is based on a spatial calibration of the statistical distribution of SWH performed through a non-linear transformation of the Empirical Orthogonal Functions of the modeled data that minimizes the differences with observations. This allows the calibration to be implemented not only at buoy locations, but also all over the model domain. The resulting fields were validated against satellite altimetry observations, showing an average reduction of about 76% in the bias and of about 10% in the root mean squared differences with respect to observations. •Wave climate in the Western Mediterranean is presented through the calibration of an update wind wave hindcast (1958–2008).•Buoy observations from 22 stations are used for the calibration of SWH.•Calibrated SWH is validated with altimetry data. Bias and RMS are improved by 76% and 10% in average, respectively.