It was a Wednesday in August 1996. In just a few minutes, a huge waterspout devastated the Camping de Las Nieves, located in the Aragonese Pyrenees, taking the lives of 87 people, as well as cars, caravans and tents. After a strong storm, which left about 160 liters of water per square meter, the stones, branches and trunks accumulated forming a natural wall 10 meters high at the head of the Arás ravine. When the water overcame the wall, the campsite, which was in a floodable area, was completely destroyed: only the services and the social center of the complex remained standing. On the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest natural tragedies that Spain has experienced in decades, three witnesses of what happened tell what they experienced in the video that accompanies this news.
"We were hit by a wave of water that swept us all away," recalls Sergio Murillo, one of the survivors of the tragedy, in which he lost his entire family (his parents and his two brothers) and who saved his own life with the help of a log to which he clung. The residents of Biescas and the rescue services worked for days in search of survivors like Murillo who lived as a child, as many of the affected families took the case to trial. After a long process that reached the Strasbourg Court, the State ended up being sentenced to pay 11 million to the victims. 25 years after what happened, the survivors ask that that preventable catastrophe be remembered and the residents of Biescas try to overcome a wound that is remembered every August in the valley.Murillo has the consolation that what happened forced to modify the regulations for the installation of camping to prevent that, like the one in Las Nieves, they can rise in areas that can be flooded.