Water, always water. When the noise of the machines stops, when the camera lights are turned off, when the bustle of volunteers, soldiers, journalists stops, it is the sound of water that breaks the silence of the streets of Letur and accompanies the neighbors in this extended time that began on Tuesday. Three days have passed since that placid sound that always follows them became a roar and the water of the stream, their most precious asset and their pride, changed into a fury of mud, branches, rocks that crossed the town like a stab in the back. , gobbling up houses and memories. Since then, the wait has turned into despair, because, three days later, there is still no trace of five of the six people missing after the flood caused by DANA.
“It came like in a movie, like a tsunami. A curtain of water of enormous height,” says Manuel Ortuño Tomás, one of the neighbors who, early on Friday, approached what was the beginning of the old town and where now the retreat of the water has left an enormous amount of sediments.
“It was all at once, from one to 100. As if you stepped on the accelerator and boom! There was a woman who drove by shortly before with her son driving. He had the ability to see that it was going to leak and they managed to get down and save themselves, but he caught those two workers there,” he adds, reminding two of the five people who are still looking for each other, Juan Alejandro and Manuel, 34 and 46 years old, who were going up the hill aboard a City Council van when the water overflowed.
The other three are Antonia, a woman who had returned to live in the town after retirement, and Jonathan and Mónica, a couple of 37 and 38 years old. Their house, one of the first in the old town, and from which they asked for help until the last moment before disappearing, no longer exists. And that hole, that tear at the entrance to the town, is the image of the drama that is being experienced in these hours in Letur.
There the excavators work to remove the earth and make a walkway that unites the old part of the town with the new, while the UME dogs search the alleys that at another time, on a festive bridge, would have been filled with tourists. . The search is being made on the surface, after the Civil Guard divers submerged without success in the water areas, the pools and the channel of the rambla that crosses the town, in the five kilometers that from here separate them from the Segura River. .
“My brother went to work at two o’clock and that was at ten to two. My sister-in-law was going to go to school to pick up the girl. Five more minutes and there would have been no one home,” says Tamara Muñoz, Jonathan’s sister, who doesn’t understand how it could happen. The last image he has of him is the one described to him by the priest and the neighbors who saw how he fought to get to safety: “They asked for help and my brother tried to use boards to cross to another house, they say he tried to grab a blanket, a sheet, and that he was tying something to try to get out of there. “Both of them, him and his wife.”
The couple had two children, a 10-year-old girl and a boy who turns 14 this Saturday. “It came to them suddenly. But the flood came from more than 30 kilometers through the mountains, from above. They already knew that it was going down the Sabinar. How did they not have time to tell them to evacuate? Yes, when they light a fire in the forest, within five minutes the Seprona is there! I live in Socovos, a few kilometers from here, and I found out because I was finishing eating and my cousin called me. ‘How are Mónica and Joni?’, he told me. And I: ‘How are they going to be? Good’. But it hadn’t rained much in Letur, it was in the mountains,” he repeats. The problem was not the water that fell in the town, but rather the water that flooded the head of the basin, in the territory of Moratalla, already in Murcia.
“It really didn’t rain much here. Only 35 liters fell here. We had an alert that the weather plan was activated by the Autonomous Community of Castilla-La Mancha and all administrations are warned that there is an orange alert,” says the mayor of the town, Sergio Marín, in a moment of rest. in one of the rooms of the Nuestra Señora de la Asunción school, which has become the headquarters of emergency operations in the town.
When asked about the neighbors’ comments about the amount of weeds that came down along the water along the riverbed, he answers: “I met recently, a few months ago, with the president of the Segura Hydrographic Confederation. With him and with the commissioner, I raised the possibility and need to clean the Letur channel. Since 2009, if I’m not mistaken, the area of the stream, the closest to the urban area, had not been cleaned.”
Marín is 29 years old and this is his second term as head of the City Council. He was elected for the first time in 2019, when he was 24 and had just finished law school.
His dream was to accompany his neighbors in this second life that Letur had been experiencing for a few years after a tourist conversion that has transformed it into one of the most sought-after destinations in this mountain range, earning the nickname “pearl of Segura” and “ water paradise”, for its natural pools of crystal clear waters.
“The town of water that is affected by water… It will no longer be Letur as we knew it. But I am sure that it will continue to have that identity,” says the mayor. “In winter there are around 500 people more or less in the entire municipality, always living here, and about 60-70 in the old town. But then we have 700 hospitality places. I don’t even want to imagine what would have happened if the flood had been this weekend. “I don’t even want to imagine it.”
In another room of the school, food is prepared for the soldiers who work in the rescue operations and the volunteers who help clean the houses and basements that have been filled with mud. Decorations from a Halloween party that was not held hang in the little ones’ classrooms.
Outside, in the patio, there are hugs from neighbors who reunite with those who live outside and have returned to the town to be with their loved ones. Among them is the singer Rozalén. “We all felt that helplessness of being away and when you are here, even if you can’t do anything, at least we are together. Even if it’s to cry together. But you are here and you even feel a kind of relief when you arrive,” he says.
Many mention it when they talk about the rebirth of the town, about the new life of Letur in recent years focused on tourism. “This town is very small. Now I was in a pretty critical moment. We hold the Festival against rural depopulation, Leturalma, in the summer and we have been there for many years now. It is a town that rows a lot so that people know it, but there are very few of us. We all have a relationship with everyone, with those who are there, with those who have disappeared, with the woman who has died. I know perfectly well who they are. Monica is from my fifth. We played together when we were little. And the lady they found was close to my grandmother,” adds the artist.
Antonio Garrido also returned this Thursday to the family home in Letur to which he returns every time he can. It is the home of reunions, of his children’s summers, of reconciling with the place he had to leave because “he was very hungry.”
He hasn’t lived here since he left when he was 18 to, like many, look for a future outside. He is 75 now and remembers that exodus of the sixties that emptied this and many other towns of young people. They were going to Murcia, Castellón, Valencia… “These days I have felt a great, very great emptiness. People left here for decades. Now there are no more than a thousand people registered, and many are those who returned in recent years but after their retirement.” Like Antonia, one of the people who is still being sought, along with Manuel, Juan Alejandro, Mónica and Jonathan. “Let’s fight. They are searching. Many good people are looking. They are going out of their way and helping us a lot. A lot of warmth from the people, a lot of support. And that is what gives us strength,” says Tamara Muñoz, Jonathan’s sister.
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