The warm Valencia air, still thick with dust and carrying a residual note of mud and damp concrete, begins to reek on the approach to the roadside dump where diggers toil, gulls scavenge and the detritus of countless everyday lives rises in mounds.
Almost two months on, the legacy of the worst natural disaster to hit Spain this century is equally evident in the oranges rotting on the trees, in the tens of thousands of cars stacked in makeshift graveyards, and in the fatigue of all those who still queue daily for food, nappies and toilet roll.
On 29 October, the eastern Spanish region was pummelled by rains so heavy that a year’s worth of water fell in some areas over the space of just eight hours. The rains brought floods that swept through towns and villages, drowning people in their houses, garages and cars and carrying others off to more distant deaths. Two hundred and twenty-three people were killed in Valencia, seven in the neighbouring region of Castilla-La Mancha and one farther south in Andalucía. Three people are still missing.
After three days of national mourning had been declared and mention made of the need for unity, solidarity and rebuilding, the inevitable political blame game began and, bit by bit, international interest started to wane amid the re-election of Donald Trump and the conflagrations in the Middle East.
But while the mud and cars and debris may have been cleared from the streets over the past few weeks – much of it by an army of volunteers from all over Spain – life for those in some of the hardest-hit areas remains in disarray.
In the town of Paiporta, known as the ground zero of the floods, people queue outside the municipal concert hall for food, water and toiletries that are dispensed by soldiers. Close by, staff from World Central Kitchen provide hot meals to those in need.
With only two of the town’s 10 supermarkets open, Beatriz Mota, a 35-year-old physiotherapist, has come down to pick up a packet of toilet paper. She counts herself lucky to be able to do so. “There are a lot of old people here who can’t get out because the lifts in their block of flats aren’t working,” she says.
Only two of Paiporta’s six schools have reopened and many people are still unable to get into their garages because of the mud and water. Reminders of what happened, she adds, are never far away: last week, a clearance worker came across the body of a Moroccan man who had lived in a shack near the metro station and who had been missing since 29 October. The discovery of his remains brought the death toll in the town to 46.
“We feel a bit abandoned – not by our fellow citizens, but by the authorities,” says Mota. “We’re all still in survival mode here, queueing for food and I don’t think that the psychological reality of all this has hit yet, but it will. The politicians are still arguing about whose fault it was but we’re still here and we still need help.”
Many people in Valencia and beyond cannot fathom why, despite several meteorological warnings, the regional government did not send an emergency alert to people’s mobiles until after 8pm on the day of the floods. Nor do they understand how the regional president, Carlos Mazón, could find time for a three-hour lunch with a journalist that day when parts of his region were under 3 metres of waters and the unprecedented scale of the disaster was patently obvious.
Some of the resultant rage was directed at Spain’s political class five days after the floods, when King Felipe and Queen Letizia visited Paiporta – accompanied by Mazón and the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez – and were met with handfuls of mud and shouts of “murderers”.
“People are really angry because the financial help hasn’t arrived from the authorities,” says Mota. At the mention of the powers-that-be, her partner, Daniel Gutiérrez, shakes his head and repeats the slogan on lips and walls across the province.
“Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo,” he says: “Only the people save the people.”
Nearby Picanya is also still scarred by the floods. Four of the town’s five bridges were washed away and the streets, crowded with army vehicles and rescue specialists from the military emergencies unit, have a post-earthquake feel. With the exception of the odd bar and cafe, most of the town’s small businesses have not managed to pick up where they left off.
“Practically all the local businesses are waiting for their insurance money to come through,” says Toni Moreno as he prepares to reopen the ironmonger’s his family has run for two generations. “The problem is that you need a basic amount of money to get your business up and running again and if you don’t have that money, you can’t get going again. The money from the authorities is just trickling through in dribs and drabs.”
Jesús González, a 48-year-old metro employee who has been working remotely since the floods, thinks the return to anything approaching normality will take years. Just look at the health centre, he says.
“They’re fixing it up now but not all the staff are working because there aren’t enough workspaces for them,” he says. “If you need to see the doctor, you have to go to the health centre and wait and wait. There are normally two paediatricians and now there’s only one. I had to take my daughter in for an emergency yesterday and we had to wait two hours to be seen.”
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Then there is the mobility problem. With about 120,000 cars wrecked by the floods, Paiporta metro station destroyed and local bus services under pressure, many people are stuck or dependent on lifts or loans of cars from friends and relatives.
Besides, as González notes, Picanya was never the richest of places. “If things were a bit lacking before this, then they’re even worse now,” he says.
Although he lost thousands of euros’ worth of possessions to the mud and the waters, others have been robbed of far more than that.
Xavi Castillo, a well-known actor, writer and comic, lost 95% of the items in his small warehouse: theatre scenery, costumes, masks, lights, computers, and dozens of notebooks filled with scripts, sketches and ideas.
“We saved what we could,” he said. “But it was just a total tsunami. I’ve lost 30 years of my professional life in theatre.”
While Castillo can find a kind of absurd humour in all that has happened – he picks up a large prop sword and jokingly plots his vengeance – he is furious at the regional government’s response to the crisis.
“There was that long lunch and all the incompetence,” he says. “And it’s not just about what happened on the day but about what followed. People are really angry. The financial help isn’t getting through.”
A few kilometres away in La Masía del Juez, the visual artist Ricardo Cases is also scouring the wreckage of his creative life.
“The water rushed into my studio and swept everything away,” he says. “It’s all scattered everywhere around. You can now take a tour of all the work I did over so many years. All the stuff from my exhibitions, all my books and mock-ups have been chewed up and scattered over a radius of about 500 metres. I’ve been coming across things but none of them can be saved.”
Cases is planning a cathartic work, provisionally called Catalogue, on all the treasured photographic books he has lost. The project is going some way to distracting him from the present.
“I try not to think about it, but when I think about it all in the middle of the night, I can’t get back to sleep.”
As Christmas approaches, and the rubbish, cars and recriminations continue to pile up, the solidarity that initially greeted the crisis is dwindling. Particularly galling for Castillo and others is the perception that the emergency is somehow over.
“I was in Barcelona last week and people there have the sense that it’s all better now,” he says. “And I said, ‘No, it’s not. We’re not back to normal.’ That’s impossible.”
And then, of course, there is the politics of it all. A homemade banner hanging from one balcony, already a little grubby with all the dust, reads: “Sánchez y Mazón, Dimisión” (“Sánchez and Mazón, resign”).
But the people of Picanya and Paiporta aren’t holding their breath for action or apologies. They know that months and years of squabbles, excuses and deflections lie ahead and that, more often than not, solo el pueblo salva al pueblo (only the people save the people).
“We parents have done more when it comes to cleaning the local school than the regional government has,” says one man. “But this is the political level we’re at.”
