If we hadn’t already been here last year, it would be difficult to believe that above this handful of debris a three-generation-old house was once standing.
We came back to Torrent, just outside Valencia, to meet again with sisters Amparo and Isabel, who survived the Spanish floods on 29 October 2024.
During that terrible night, their family home was swept away by the water in a matter of seconds. It’s the first time they have been back since then.
“We were born in this place and always stayed here,” Amparo says.
“Our whole life was here. I remember my books were there,” Isabel adds, pointing to a smashed tile on the ground.
Amparo recalls through tears the family gatherings while cooking paellas around the fireplace. She shows us a video of her niece unpacking presents and playing with her dog.
Where decades of Christmases had been celebrated there is now nothing but grass trying to grow.
Like many, they feel abandoned by the regional government. The only reason they’re alive is they didn’t wait for the official warning before escaping.
By the time an alert came, 229 lives had already been lost.
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Investigations have centred on whether deaths could have been prevented if authorities hadn’t taken so long to let the population know about the risks.
We asked governor Carlos Mazon for an interview, but he declined.
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‘Apocalyptic scenes’
“It is clear the local government didn’t act and that its top officials were not worried about how the catastrophe was evolving,” the national government’s delegate for Valencia, Pilar Bernabe Garcia, tells Sky News.
During her first interview with foreign media, she says she testified in an ongoing case that the regional governor disappeared instead of leading the emergency response efforts.
She has formally accused him of mishandling the disaster.
“Local mayors were calling me saying their citizens were drowning,” she says. “I’ll never forget the apocalyptic scenes I saw. Every morning when I wake up, I cannot think about anything else.”
Thousands of people have taken to the streets in monthly calls for the governor to resign, feeling betrayed by who was supposed to protect them.
Rosa Alvarez, head of an association representing Valencia’s flood victims, explains: “Nobody had warned us. We were just having a normal life that day, like now.”
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‘I just hope he died quickly’
While she’s busy organising the memorial that will be held this afternoon, and attended by thousands including the Spanish King, she welcomes us into her house in Catarroja where her father died.
“His body was swept away for 700 metres, through this wall. The wounds on him were brutal. I just hope he died quickly,” she says.
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The water reached up to more than two metres in the flat and remained like that for hours. A pile of at least seven cars blocked the entrance door. She blames the governor for her father’s death.
“Every death – including my father’s – occurred before 20.11 (8.11pm). That’s when the governor sent the late and wrong phone alert,” she tells us.
She underlines she’s more angry than sad.
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In many places nearby, time seems to have stood still since the tragedy.
Paiporta has become a ghost town with its river dried up. Shops left in a hurry and never reopened, including a funeral agency with the coffins still inside.
On one of the few bridges standing, red and white candles symbolise the victims.
Below them is a sign, written in the Valencian dialect: “20.11. In memory, not in forgetting.”
