Floods and worse

A visitor to Valencia has to be struck by the extraordinary, nearly ten-kilometre long park that runs through the city centre.

It looks like a riverbed for the excellent reason that that’s exactly what it is. In fact, Valencians still refer to it as ‘the river’. No river flows down it, however, and as well as grass and trees, cycle lanes and running tracks, and shaded walkways, it includes football pitches, a rugby pitch, an athletics stadium and a baseball field as well as a pleasure lake at one end, and a complex known as the ‘City of Arts and Sciences at the other’.

The river Túria, which once flowed here, has gone. And where has it gone? Out to the south of the city where it runs, though not very often, down to the Mediterranean.

Why do I say not very often? Because while Valencia has quite decent levels of rainfall, like most parts of Spain it doesn’t have enough water just to let it keep flowing off to the sea. So the Túria is heavily dammed outside the city and, most of the time, even the new bed is pretty well dry, with the water held in reservoirs, for, I suppose, the opposite of a rainy day.

How did this is all happen? Well, back in October 1957, there was heavy flooding, costing around 100 lives and huge physical damage. You can question the decision now, on environmental grounds, but back then it was felt that the best solution was to divert the river out of the centre of Valencia to make sure that never happened again.

What would have been an appalling outcome would have been if the original plan had been stuck to. That was to put a motorway down the old riverbed, to link the city with the port and the airport. Fortunately, although this was still in the time of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a massive popular movement, “the river is ours and we want it green”, was able to convince the authorities to drop their plan and go for something more attractive.

It still took until 1986, long after the return of democracy, for the park to be officially opened. For many years, much of the riverbed was a dank wasteland used as a dumping ground. A friend of ours remembers standing on a bridge with school friends and throwing stones at the bloated stomachs of cows flung there from the local slaughterhouse. It was dramatic, apparently, to see the stomachs eventually explode.

Individuals began planting trees in this mess and, in time, the city council moved in and did some landscaping work, putting in the sports grounds, running tracks and cycling lanes, to make the glorious park which is such a precious public resource for Valencians today.

But back to 1957. One of our neighbours kept a newspaper supplement from November of that year, full of photographs of the flooding and its aftermath.

Looking through them is a poignant experience, revealing the horror of the event. But I also found it a chilling reminder of other aspects of the time.

The river in spate in 1957. The park at peace today

It was striking to see a river in spate rushing down what is now the park.

Equally dramatic was a photo of the Serrano Towers, now a major tourist landmark, with their base in the muddy waters.

The Serrano towers in the floods, and today

And I was also fascinated by a picture of the great square in the centre of city, near the old town hall, turned into a lake. But what struck me most about that photo was the caption, which described the square as the ‘Plaza del Caudillo’, or Chieftain Square. ‘Caudillo’ was the title the dictator of Spain assigned himself, not entirely inappropriately: he had no legitimacy apart from what force could give him. Like any bandit chief, he’d used violence to take what he wanted. He drew on the backing of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to reach his goal and, once there, he wreaked ruthless reprisals against his defeated, democratic adversaries. The total number of his victims isn’t known, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands, as are the numbers of refugees who fled abroad.

Plaza del Caudillo, flooded
and Plaza del Ayuntamiento, with more controlled water

Today, the square has the anodyne and neutral name of ‘Plaza del Ayuntamiento’, Town Hall Square. It was a little shocking to see it referred to as ‘Plaza del Caudillo’.

But then, I’d had the same shock when I first looked at the newspaper supplement. The front page has a photo of dignitaries visiting the stricken city, like politicians anywhere inspecting the site of a natural disaster. But one of them, surrounded by military men and Ministers, is Franco. It appalled me a little to see him behaving like an ordinary politician, given the man he was.

Franco (left of the front row)
and other dignitaries visiting Valencia after the floods

The caption, too, left me a smiling a little wryly. It described the flooding as the worst disaster to have hit the city since the ‘liberation’. I presume liberation in this context means the installation of the dictatorship.

That would be quite amusing if there weren’t, in Spain, quite a current of opinion, and even a party represented in Parliament, which seems nostalgic for a liberation of that kind.

We can be grateful that the city is at least safe from the kind of disaster that the 1957 floods represented. Sadly, however, the work of protecting ourselves from the kind of disaster Franco inflicted is never over. It has to be renewed in every generation.

And not just in Spain.