The woman who was seen holding a sobbing Queen Letizia as the Spanish royal family paid a visit to the flood-ravaged Valencian town of Paiporta has revealed exactly what she said to the monarch to make her break down.
The flood victim, who gave her name as Alicia, appeared to offer the emotional queen a shoulder to cry on and a comforting embrace in a series of images that went viral following the royal visit on Sunday.
Yet Alicia has now set the record straight – she was not there to console, but to confront.
‘People have called me from all over, from Italy, from Romania… they say that I was trying to console the queen.
‘What I was telling her was that they had not seen anything of what happened, that they should go into the town,’ Alicia told Las Provincias, recounting the moment that left Letizia struggling to maintain composure.
‘This could have been avoided.’
Alicia’s frustration is emblematic of the outrage simmering in Paiporta where flash floods left homes and businesses left buried under thick mud, killed dozens of people and left thousands more without food, water and basic aid.
Rescuers and divers are still combing through flooded underground car parks in search of bodies.
Though Queen Letizia and King Felipe arrived hoping to bring comfort, they were instead met with a wave of raw emotion. Survivors recounted their harrowing experiences while others pelted the monarchs with mud and chanted ‘murderers!’
Letizia looked on several occasions to be overwhelmed by the torrent of anger after mudslingers in the crowd left her face spattered with dirt.
Eyes bulging from her head, the Queen was seen gingerly rubbing her temples in an attempt to remain calm before she burst into tears amid her conversation with Alicia.
‘All she could say was, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Alicia recalled.
Much of Valencia is still reeling almost a week after the floods swept through and devastated communities, with other storm systems now pelting Barcelona with torrential rain.
The official death toll from last week’s flooding stands at 217 but there are fears it will continue to increase with many people still missing and hopes for finding survivors ebbing.
Almost all the deaths have been in the Valencia region, where thousands of security and emergency services frantically cleared debris and mud in the search for bodies.
With telephone and transport networks severely damaged, establishing a precise figure of missing people is difficult.
While Letizia was reduced to tears by the stories from flood survivors in Paiporta on Sunday, King Felipe cut a sombre figure, touring the town with a look of quiet sorrow etched across his face.
He largely accepted the rage directed at him, offering condolences, speaking one-on-one with residents and embracing several distraught victims even after being forced to seek protection from demonstrators flinging mud and projectiles in his direction.
But even he could not hold back from snapping at one particularly vulgar crowd member, barking in response to their screams: ‘If you want, I won’t come – I’ll stay in Madrid (next time).’
Though the monarchs faced harsh treatment, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was met with downright anger and aggression.
Many Valencians blame Sanchez and his government for the perceived failings of authorities to warn residents about the flood and provide immediate aid in its aftermath.
People repeatedly screamed at him to leave as soon as he stepped out of his vehicle – he was quickly bundled back into his car which was set upon by protesters who kicked at the bodywork and battered the windows.
Throughout the royal visit to Paiporta, traumatised victims spoke with reporters and media outlets to tell of the dire situation and explain their anger directed towards the monarchs and the Prime Minister.
Jose Ribelles, a 23-year-old supermarket worker whose life had been upended by the flood, told the Times: ‘What do you expect? For us to tell him sweet nothings?’
He accused the Spanish state of not doing enough to support victims of the flood.
‘They wanted to kill us. The first thing you have to do is warn people when a dam is about to be overwhelmed and broken.
‘You can’t warn people when they are already drowning.’
He said he witnessed several dead bodies in the supermarket he worked at.
‘There were 12 deaths among my colleagues. The flood got them in the garage.’
The floods had already hit Paiporta when the regional officials issued an alert to mobile phones.
It sounded two hours too late, with thousands of homes already overrun by the deluge by the time the alert rang out.
More anger has been fuelled by the inability of officials to respond quickly to the aftermath.
‘We have lost everything!’ people were heard telling the King and Queen.
Even now, five days after the flood struck, many people still don’t have drinking water.
Internet and mobile phone coverage remains patchy, and most people only got power back on Saturday.
Stores and supermarkets are in ruins and Paiporta, with a population 30,000, still has many city blocks completely clogged with piles of detritus, countless totalled cars and a ubiquitous layer of mud.
Another Paiportan resident, 20-year-old Francisco Javier Molina, added: ‘The king and all came very clean and to look good in front of the town and cameras but this doesn’t help us at all.
‘He should come here and get rid of the mud and the dead that are in garages. And then he’ll be one of us.’
According to a journalist for Spanish broadcaster RTVE, one woman wept and told the king she did not have food and nappies, while another person said: ‘Don’t abandon us.’
The royals spent roughly an hour trying to calm tempers in Paiporta before leaving.
They were meant to visit another nearby town, Chiva, but it was later revealed that they ‘postponed the visit’, fearing another similar reception.
Chiva citizens reportedly shouted ‘cowards’ at the absent monarchs.
One woman who lives there, Maria Tarin, told the Times: ‘The king can shove it but it’s (Valencia President) Carlos Mazon and Pedro Sanchez who are to blame.
‘Better that they didn’t come because it wouldn’t have ended well for them.’
Both Sanchez and Mazon were forced to flee Paiporta as enraged residents attempted to attack their cars.
‘I understand the indignation and of course I stayed to receive it,’ Mazon later said on X.
‘It was my moral and political obligation. The attitude of the king this morning was exemplary.’
Sanchez wrote: ‘I want to express all my government’s solidarity and its acknowledgement of the anguish, suffering, uncertainty and the needs of the residents of Paiporta and the region of Valencia’.
He added that he believes the majority of people ‘reject the types of violence that unfortunately we saw.’
Isabel Diaz Ayuso, president of the community government in Madrid, echoed the praise for the King and added that Queen Letizia embodied ‘the sentiment of Spain’.
The extraordinary scenes in Paiporta on Sunday underscored the depth of the anger in the country over the response to the nation’s worst such in decades.
Describing ‘the worst natural disaster in the recent history of our country,’ Prime Minister Sanchez said it was the second deadliest flood in Europe this century.
‘I am aware the response is not enough, there are problems and severe shortages… towns buried by mud, desperate people searching for their relatives… we have to improve,’ Sanchez said.
With an extra 10,000 troops, police and civil guards sent to the Valencia region, Spain has now ordered its largest peacetime military and security force deployment, Sanchez said.
Still, most of the clean-up of the layers of mud and debris that invaded countless homes has been carried out by residents and thousands of volunteers.
‘Thank you to the people who have come to help us, to all of them, because from the authorities: nothing,’ Estrella Caceres, 66, told AFP in the town of Sedavi.
In Chiva, restaurant owner Danna Daniella said she was still in shock, haunted by memories of people trapped by the raging floods ‘asking for help and there was nothing we could do’.
‘It drives you crazy. You look for answers and you don’t find them.’
Six days on from the horrendous floods, many parts of Valencia remain inaccessible and communities have largely been forced to fend for themselves.
Sanchez said yesterday that electricity had been restored to 94 per cent of homes affected by power outages and that around half of the cut telephone lines had been repaired.
But Transport Minister Oscar Puente told El Pais daily that certain places would probably remain inaccessible by land for weeks because local and regional roads resembled a ‘Swiss cheese’.
On Sunday, the Valencia government limited the number of volunteers authorised to travel to the city’s southern suburbs to 2,000 and restricted access to 12 localities.
Despite this thousands made their way to stricken communes on foot, carrying brooms and shovels.
Restoring order and distributing aid to destroyed towns and villages – some of which have been cut off from food, water and power since Tuesday’s torrent – is a priority.
Storms coming off the Mediterranean are common this time of year.
But scientists have warned that climate change is increasing the ferocity, length and frequency of extreme weather events.
The damage from the storm late Tuesday and early Wednesday last week recalled the aftermath of a tsunami, with survivors left to pick up the pieces as they mourn their loved ones.
Cars were piled on one another like fallen dominoes, uprooted trees, downed power lines and household items all mired in mud that covered streets in dozens of communities in Valencia.
Scientists explained how the deluge began after cold and warm air clashed to produce powerful rain clouds.
The phenomenon is known locally as DANA, a Spanish acronym for high-altitude isolated depression, and unlike common storms or squalls it can form independently of polar or subtropical jet streams.
When cold air blows over warm Mediterranean waters it causes hotter air to rise quickly and form towering, dense, water-laden clouds that can remain over the same area for many hours, raising their destructive potential.
The event sometimes provokes large hail storms and tornadoes, as seen this week, meteorologists say.
Eastern and Southern Spain are particularly susceptible to the phenomenon due to its position between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.
Warm, humid air masses and cold fronts meet in a region where mountains favour the formation of storm clouds and rainfall.
The country has also suffered through an almost two-year drought, meaning that when the deluge happened, the ground was so hard that it could not absorb the rain, worsening the effect of the flash floods.