Two dead in the Bierzo as Spain stays on alert for the Dana

An isolated upper-level low, known in Spain as a Dana, has crossed the Iberian peninsula and the Balearic Islands. The provisional toll is two dead and five injured.

The two victims are women of around sixty. They were trapped in the cellar of a house in Manzanedo de Valdueza, in the Bierzo district, which filled with water and mud within minutes. The five injured include a three-month-old baby and a four-year-old child. Four people were admitted to the hospital in Ponferrada, which has declared three days of mourning.

The flood hit the hamlets of San Clemente and Nouzas hardest. The water damaged roads, bridges and homes, entered the town hall and brought down trees. In the hours that followed, civil protection teams worked to restore road links cut in several places by landslides.

Record rainfall in thirty-five minutes

On the eastern side of the country the phenomenon struck with the same force. At Bejís, in the province of Castellón, 186 litres of rain per square metre fell, 126 of them within a single hour. In that area such an amount corresponds to several months of ordinary rainfall.

The national weather agency Aemet kept its warning for further downpours in place over thirteen provinces: Castellón, Teruel, Barcelona, Girona, Burgos, León, Palencia, Soria, La Rioja, Jaén, Granada, Lleida and Tarragona. The main risk is not the total amount of rain but its concentration in a short time over ground made impermeable by weeks of drought.

Danas form when a mass of cold air becomes isolated at altitude over the western Mediterranean and meets very warm surface water. It is a typical phenomenon of the late Spanish summer, and in recent years it has produced increasingly concentrated episodes. The memory of the flooding that struck the province of Valencia in 2024 still weighs on how warnings are handled, and this time the authorities pushed emergency messages to mobile phones before the rain arrived.