“Mom, the sea has risen!” Pilar Espinosa shouted when she was preparing to go to school. Before her eyes, everything was water, after a terrifying liquid mass rushed over Valencia. It occurred on October 13 and 14, 1957, when an unprecedented deluge dumped nearly 630 liters of water per square meter on the capital of Turia, almost double the maximum rainfall in Europe since 1900.
“The water washed away everything,” Espinosa recalls at the age of 76, “because the storm arrived at dawn and devastated the Cabanyal corrals, without anything being able to be saved. You could see floating pigs, dogs, chickens, melons, watermelons… Few cats, however,” recalls this woman, who was ten years old at the time.
Unlike the kittens, who were able to climb trees and roofs, at ground level the landscape was apocalyptic. El Cabanyal, for example, the neighborhood where Toni García also lived, was literally left under those reddish and earthy waters, and even more so was the neighborhood of Natzaret, which was somewhat sunken.
The same age as Espinosa, García continues to keep images of those days very fresh in his retina. “I remember,” he says, “that my friend Juan's father, who was a civil guard and, at the same time, a guest attendant at the Lys cinemas in Valencia, came at night with his Lambretta motorcycle shouting: 'The flood is coming!'” remember.
On the eve of the two floods separated by twelve hours that flooded 75% of the city of Valencia, the night watchmen and municipal guards began to sound the alarm, knocking on the patio doors to try to wake up the neighbors. It was in vain: at one in the morning, a huge torrent of churning water penetrated many neighborhoods.
Curiously, the previous days the sky was the color of charcoal, but it hardly rained, so the capital of Turia remained oblivious to what was happening in the interior regions. In some places more than 600 liters per square meter had been collected.
It was then when Radio Valencia began to transmit this message: “Attention, attention, attention. As communicated to us by the civil government of the province and the most excellent Lord Mayor of the city, everyone is warned, and mainly the residents of the Marchalenes and Nazaret neighborhoods, that the Turia River has experienced a significant flood that, in its path by Manises, presents truly alarming characters.”
To finish things off, on Monday, October 14, it started to rain like it rains in Valencia on big occasions. Suddenly, the storm that since the beginning of October 1957 had swept the upper, middle and lower course of the Turia presented its credentials.
If at four in the morning on the 14th the flow of the Turia was 2,700 cubic meters per second, at two and a half in the afternoon, it became 3,700, which caused the water to block the eyes of the five bridges of the city, overflowing the parapets. Thus, the streets began to flood even more, while the rain intensified.
At that time, the telephone had stopped working and in many neighborhoods so had the electricity. It was then that people began to gather on the rooftops. Already the day before, some people, the chronicles say, threw lit papers from there to observe whether the water level had increased or decreased throughout the night.
The most colossal spectacle was the Turia River, running wildly and forming waves on which rode animals, mattresses, logs, reeds, drums and even some people shouting for help. They were hours of confusion. Those who lived on the first floors could touch the water from the balconies.
However, it did not reach everywhere equally: on Doctor Olóriz Street (located on the opposite shore to the Torres de Serrano), it reached 5 meters; in the Parterre gardens, 3.20 meters; on Baix street, in the Carme neighborhood, the 3 meters; and in Pintor Sorolla the 2.70 meters.
During that month of October, many Valencians were staying in bed because of “Asiatic,” a little-known epidemic that spread around the world and killed between one and four million people in two years. The sick of all types who lived on the ground floors had to be hurriedly transferred to higher-rise homes of relatives and friends.
It was not the case of Amparo Aparisi. While he was resting on the seventh floor of Gran Vía Ramón y Cajal because of the Asian woman, Aparisi heard his brother say that, along La Paz Street (in the heart of València), wooden boats were sailing, after the city had become on the river island that was in 138 BC. C., when the Romans settled in one of the meanders of the Tyris, or Turia, river.
Another Valencian, Marisa Torres, was also sick with the flu: “We lived more or less in the middle of Puerto Avenue, on Industria Street. I was seven years old and my mother told me that Mari Tere, Pepita and Vorín [in Valencia, the abbreviation of Salvador is Voro, and the diminutive of Voro, Vorín], my friends from the ground floor, were going up, because my parents “They offered to come to our house,” he recalls at 73 years old.
“I also remember that my mother wrapped me in a blanket and took me out to the balcony so I could see the flood arrive, which was coming from the city towards the sea. I was very struck by the fact that the wave was so gentle. Then, my mother took me inside the house and closed the balcony,” she says about that night.
With the ground floors closed tight, a silent wave ran along Puerto Avenue, an artery almost three kilometers long, and covered it with three spans of water (among other things, because the water spread across the streets that they crossed it).
At the same time, the residents of Montanejos Street, the dead end where Toni García lived, were beginning to organize. “Some had a thick rope tied around their waist to cross the street and prevent the water from washing them away, so they could exchange food,” he reports about the situation he experienced when he was nine years old.
“Days after the flood, my group of friends and I were walking along Las Arenas beach, and when we stepped on something soft, it was either an animal or a buried person,” highlights this Valencian.
Although the Franco regime gave the official figure of 81 deaths due to the 1957 flood, many Valencians claim that, in reality, there were many more.
Since the post-war period, thousands of families had been forced to settle in inhumane conditions, in uralite shanties, in the riverbed, taking advantage of the water to plant orchards for self-consumption. At one time more than ten thousand people lived there. The semi-unknown Barracas flood in 1949 swept away a large part of them. Then only 40 deaths were officially recognized.
Although in 1957 there was a prohibition on building barracks on the bed of the Turia, many continued to live in them or between the parapets of the river. “Nothing was heard from them again,” says García, who at that time lived in one of the so-called Devastated Regions blocks, housing offered to those who had lost everything in the war.
When days later, the storm finally subsided, València presented a Dantesque appearance: useless furniture piled up at the doors of the houses, rubble and, to make matters worse, rats running through the mud among all kinds of belongings.
There are countless anecdotes that the Valencians who lived through the flood still retain. Pilar Espinosa remembers, for example, that that day when she thought “the sea had risen” (October 14) she was struck by the fact that the color of the water was reddish. So, a week later, taking advantage of the fact that he lived on Calle de la Reina, next to the port, “I wanted to go over to see if the color of the sea was still the same as before.” And yes, days later, the sea was green or blue again, but no longer reddish. She also remembers that “the sewer covers blew up,” so instead of absorbing the water, they vomited it out like geysers.
Amparo Aparisi told her three children many years later that when she got married a year later, in 1958, Valencia still smelled of tarquín, that is, of the silt that was deposited in the streets, since the flood was in October and the city She entered the winter covered in a thick layer of mud that took months to dry. That's where the Valencian expression “fa olor a riuà” (smells like a flood) comes from, which precedes rainy days.
In turn, Toni García relates that in her school, the Enrique Terrasa school, the base of American aid was established and that they were given powdered milk there. Also that after the flood the infections multiplied and that he and his brothers were sent with a sister of his mother to Burriana (Castellón) so that they would not catch typhus.
For her part, it comes to Marisa Torres' mind that for months she was going to school in wellies, “even though it was extremely sunny,” to protect herself from the mud.
After the 1957 flood, it was said that those rains and the subsequent flow that the Turia reached were an unrepeatable catastrophe. However, with the incessant warming of the Mare Nostrum and what has recently happened in Libya and Greece, it is difficult to say with certainty.
In any case, the flood left a lesson for posterity: Roman Valencia, which was founded on a small river terrace, was left almost intact, while the riverbed constructions were destroyed. The fact that the Plaza de la Virgen and the archiepiscopal palace came out relatively well led the Franco regime to present it as a miracle. However, the reality was different: the Romans knew very well precisely where to position themselves so as not to have to depend on supernatural interventions of divine origin every time it rained.
