Spain has been hit by a new flooding disaster as a torrential deluge has sent cars floating down the street in Girona.
Footage shows a raging torrent of water carrying away everything in its path including several vehicles as it swept through the centre of the Catalan town of Cadaques this morning.
Today residents woke up to a new scene of destruction, with mayor Pia Serinyana revealing a total of 32 cars had been washed away by the flood water caused by a nearby river overflowing.
Many ended up piled on top of each other by a bridge in front of the town casino, with at least one of the smashed-up vehicles appearing to belong to foreign tourists because of the number plates that were clearly visible.
This comes just over a week after another flooding disaster hit Spain, in particular the Valencia region, with more than 200 people confirmed to have died.
Miraculously there were no reports of any human casualties in the former fishing village of Cadaques on Friday.
Catalan weather agency Meteocat, which published footage of the latest flash flood to hit Spain in the early hours of this morning, said: ‘This is how the Cadaques stream goes down after the intense and continuous rain this morning, where there is likely to have been more than 100mm of rainfall.’
One local resident said on X: ‘The situation is very serious in Cadaques. Dozens of cars have been swept away by the swollen stream in the town, blocking up the bridge.
‘It’s been many years since something like this happened in Cadaques.’
The town’s mayor Serinyana confirmed early this morning that no-one had been injured or killed and only material damage had occurred.
She said the number of cars swept downstream had reached 32 after the council had warned residents not to park in the area, adding: ‘We had an alert from the Operations Coordination Centre of Catalonia, but people parked their cars [anyway] and the water swept them away.’
Serinyana added: ‘There has been a lot of water falling on the mountain and, although it has hardly rained in the town, the water has swept away some parked cars.’
The heaviest rainfall occurred between 2am and 3am. While rain warnings for northeastern Catalonia remained in place, the local meteorological service predicted that the rain will ease over the weekend.
One local admitted: ‘If this raging torrent of water had come through town during the day I’m sure we would have been looking at mass casualties. The time of night this happened saved us from a certain tragedy.’
Cadaques is just over three hundred miles north of Valencia, where more than 200 people including two Britons lost their lives in flash floods late October.
Meanwhile, Paiporta in Valencia has been labeled by Spanish media as the ground zero of the natural disaster that has also left 78 people still missing, while officials say the real figure could be higher.
Over 60 people perished in Paiporta when a wave of water rushed down the Poyo canal that cuts through its center.
Frustration over the survivors’ sense of abandonment exploded in Paiporta on Sunday when a crowd greeted Spain’s royals and officials with a barrage of mud and other objects.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was rushed away and the royal couple had to eventually cancel the visit after speaking to several distraught neighbors amid a chaotic scene.
The mayor of Paiporta, a middle-class community of 30,000, on Tuesday pleaded for a ‘higher authority’ to step in and take control of her municipality because the floods had made it impossible to go on.
Mayor Maribel Albalat said all the municipal buildings, from town hall to the local police, had been severely damaged and that many of the local civil servants ‘are in a state of shock.’
‘Paiporta is a strong village, but this overwhelms out capacities as a local administration,’ she said.
The air-throbbing ‘thup, thup, thup’ of the huge, two-propeller Chinook helicopters that have flown overhead with the arrival of the army has added to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere.
The destruction, however, went far beyond Paiporta and covers a huge swath of municipalities, above all on the southern flank of Valencia city on the Mediterranean coast. Seventy-eight localities had at least one person die from the floods.
Police have expanded their search to the nearby marshes and coastline, where the waters carried some away.
The residents, businesses and town councils of the affected localities can apply for financial help from a 10.6-billion-euro relief package from Spain’s government.
The regional Valencia government, which is being slammed for not alerting the populace of the danger in time, has asked the central government in Madrid for 31 billion euros to ensure the recovery.
Over a week later, the cleanup goes on to get rid of tons of mud and debris that clog street after street, filling thousands of ground floors, destroying living rooms and kitchens.
Neighborhoods were left without shops and supermarkets after all their products were ruined. Many houses still don’t have drinking water.
An impromptu army of volunteers were the first helpers on the ground, shoveling and sweeping away the sticky brown mire covering everything, and helping to start removing pile after pile of debris that made access to cars impossible in many areas.
Authorities eventually mobilized 15,000 soldiers and police reinforcements to help firefighters search for bodies and start extracting thousands of wrecked cars strewn over streets and sunk in canal beds.
At every corner, cars are piled on top of one another or smashed into buildings, light poles, trees and bridge overpasses.