Three weeks after this town was ravaged by floodwater, Catarroja is still clearing up, and still haunted by the ghosts of its worst night.
Around us, the mood is sombre.
There are people in white hazmat suits, splattered with mud, their faces covered by masks. They emerge from the murky darkness, the light reflecting off their outfits.
A few weeks ago, nobody would look twice at a place like this – an unexceptional underground car park in a suburban town in Spain.
Now, these basements carry an air of horror.
Everyone in this region has heard the stories of what happened down in these parking lots, of how the most everyday thing became the most awful spectre of death.
In the story of the Spanish floods, there is a special place for the region’s many underground car parks.
Trapped by a surge of floodwater
Such a mundane thing, but so dreadful when you hear the tales of people who realised that heavy rain was on the way, went to move their cars and then found themselves trapped by a surge of floodwater rushing towards them.
Many died in this way. Others survived, traumatised but grateful for the luck that saw them rescued, thrown to safety by the water or able to escape.
But the stories are awful – of final, sorry phone calls from desperate people and of victims found inside cars.
We filmed the people coming out of an underground car park and they said “hello” and invited us to come and look at their work. So we edged our way down, along the ramp and into the gloom.
Struck by smell of mud and oil
A lot of things strike you quickly. First is the assault on your senses. The smell of the mud, clotted with the oil and fuel that has leaked from the cars, and mixed with various other bits of rubbish lying around on the floor. It is slick with the blend of mud and water.
There is the loud noise of the nimble machines – small bulldozers known as bobcats – that are being used to push abandoned cars out of the way and to manoeuvre them up the ramp.
The lights from these machines sweep across you, but when they go, the darkness seems ever more pressing.
The second thing that strikes you is the number of people who are working down here, in the most unpleasant conditions. They are volunteers, desperately sweeping the mud and water towards an area where it can be pumped outside.
Outside, a man is watching the hoses, shouting instructions down through a metal grate in the building.
Three weeks on from the floods, and despite relentless criticism that these towns have been forgotten, this gruelling work is still being done by good-hearted people who’ve offered their services as a favour.
One of them comes up to me in the gloom. I only see her when she tugs my jacket and says “hello”.
‘Very difficult’ work in ‘horrible conditions’
She, like the others, has come from Cordoba to help out. Her mother lives in Hove and she is baffled to meet an Englishman in this filthy basement.
“It is,” she tells me later, “very difficult, hard work in horrible conditions”.
Her friend says that it is “almost impossible to describe” how it feels to spend so much time down there in the mud and dark, with only a head torch and a broom to help you.
But the third thing that strikes you, standing amid mud, water and the wreckage of abandoned cars, is just how truly, devastatingly horrific it must have been to have found yourself caught in a place like this.
Here, like so many other of these underground car parks, the water rushed down the ramp in a torrent, eventually reaching the ceiling.
It would have been impossible to push against it to open a car door, and it’s hard to imagine swimming or wading, against that flood.
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The electricity would have failed, so everything would have been pitch black. I found myself shuddering.
Some people did escape, partly by their own perseverance, partly by the luck of being thrown to safety by the current, or rescued by neighbours. Some abandoned their cars just in time and got away.
When we first came to Catarroja, the day after the floods, I remember seeing a car that was mostly hidden on the ramp out of the parking lot.
We were told that the driver had escaped a matter of seconds before his car was submerged. He had slipped as he ran up the ramp but just scrambled to safety. Such are the margins.
We left the mud, the darkness, and the ghosts and walked back towards the sunlight.
Behind us, in the gloom, they are still clearing up.
