In Paiporta it barely rained. Sixty-two people died there.
Tuesday 29 October 2024. A DANA (an isolated pocket of very cold air high up, the old gota fría) stalled over the Valencian interior, on top of a Mediterranean still warm from summer. Turís collected 771.8 litres per square metre in 14 hours, with 184.6 in a single hour, the record for Spain. Chiva, almost 500 in eight hours: a year’s rain in an afternoon.
All that water went down the barranco del Poyo, a ravine that is usually dry, and through the towns of l’Horta Sud south of Valencia: Paiporta, Catarroja, Massanassa, Picanya… In the evening, a wall of water. 229 dead in Valencia, plus eight more in Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia; over 100,000 cars destroyed.
The detail that hurts most is the timing. AEMET put out its red warning at 7:36 in the morning. The ES-Alert reached people’s phones at 20:11, when the water was already inside the houses. The regional president, Carlos Mazón, spent the afternoon at a long lunch at a restaurant, El Ventorro, and only got to the emergency centre at about 20:28. He resigned a year later, on 3 November 2025.
The geography had been warned too: after the 1957 Turia flood, the Plan Sur moved the river away from Valencia city. It protected the city, not the towns to the south. That’s exactly where the water went.
Two years later, more storms on the same coast: Catalonia’s storms, autumn 2026.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inundaciones_de_la_DANA_de_2024_en_Espa%C3%B1a