It took them a year to prepare what was to be a magnificent adventure in which a group of nine people would travel through part of the Atlas Mountains, in Morocco, for nine days, from March 27 to April 5, 2015. Not everyone would do the same route.
In principle, only four would face the Wandras canyon, a complicated area with vertical walls of up to 800 meters, waterfalls, caverns and cracks.
That spring also had snow, something they did not expect, but for which they were prepared.
Juan Bolívar, then 27 years old, José Antonio Martínez and Gustavo Virués, both 41, were the ones who finally undertook the challenge.
Diego, Juan's brother, withdrew at the last moment because he did not consider himself qualified.
The great adventure turned into a tragedy in which two of the three lost their lives and which had a strong echo in the media.
The survivor, Juan Bolívar, now tells his story in
Free.
The tragedy of the Atlas
, from the Peninsula publishing house, presented last Wednesday, September 28, at the Andalusian library in Granada.
The adventure ended with two of the three speleologists deceased but, judging by what Bolívar tells in his book and says out loud, only one was a consequence of the accident they suffered.
The other describes it as "murder", because it was the consequence, he explains, of negligence on the part of the Moroccan rescue teams.
It has taken seven and a half years for Juan Bolívar, a Granada national police stationed in Madrid, to see his story published about him.
“He was born there, inside the ravine, perhaps because I thought there was a future for me and that I had to be optimistic”, he tells about a book that he soon began to write “as a healing process”.
"Also to let off steam," adds Bolívar, who gives a complete account of what happened without leaving anything behind.
The first conclusion is that the adventure did not take long to go wrong.
The journey through the canyon began on a Sunday and was to end, with the meeting of the other part of the group, on Tuesday night "or Wednesday," he says, "to have a little margin if something happened."
Unfortunately, the accident happened in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, just six or seven hours after it started.
After walking across the river for a long time, avoiding some waterfalls and climbing some slopes, the group came across the beginning of the most complicated part.
The unexpected snow at that height made the situation somewhat more difficult.
But they felt safe.
Gustavo Virúes, a lawyer from Cadiz and organizer of the route, led the climb, which he had already done on other occasions.
José Antonio Martínez, also a national and Granada police officer, was second, attached to the same rope.
Bolívar, at that moment in charge of the backpacks, was still in the lowest part, without a rope.
At one point, he was looking down at the floor, at his belongings, he recalls, when a sound made him look up urgently.
He saw Virués stagger uncontrollably and Martínez hit the rocks.
The first died on the spot.
Martínez stayed alive with Bolívar during the seven days it took to rescue him.
"Let's call it rescue, let's call it botched," insists Juan.
Because both he and another member of the group ―Pepe Morillas, who has participated in the presentation of the book in Granada― insist that Gustavo Virués' death was an accident, "of which we will never know what happened," they insist.
Something caused the rope and him to fall into the void, but it has never been investigated.
The death of José Antonio Martínez, however, could have been avoided.
For days he endured badly wounded by the cold and that invisible enemy that are the noises of nature in the dark.
Bolívar took care of his companion while he suffered in silence.
“It is very hard to live that, knowing that nobody will miss you in three or four days.
Sometimes I felt dead.
The sound of the blocks of snow falling from the slopes of the ravine disturbed me a lot, it paralyzed me”, he recalls.
So the days went by
"With hallucinations at times," he says, and hardly sleeping.
I barely saw Virués, deceased, because of the position he was in.
On Wednesday afternoon, suddenly, two Berbers appeared there.
Interestingly, without ropes, they had come walking.
"But those roads are only known to them," says Bolívar.
Days later, Bolívar would go out there, walking.
The Berbers took note of the situation and disappeared for help.
The next day, the Moroccan Gendarmerie took charge of the situation.
It was the beginning of what Bolívar explains as “a botched job”: “They were not prepared.
They had new material, even with labels, but they didn't know how to use it.
They rappelled in a way that hasn't been used for decades."
They tried the helicopter rescue, but it was too big, so they planned it by climbing the wall.
Meanwhile, a team of specialists in mountain rescue from the National Police was waiting in Madrid for authorization to travel and collaborate.
A group of 16 volunteer rescuers showed up in Morocco as well.
But the North African country did not accept help.
"Not even the Rajoy government had the diplomatic strength to get them to accept it," says Morillas.
The then Foreign Minister, José Manuel Margallo, accepted that there had been "dysfunctions in management."
While all this was happening, Martínez was still injured but alive down there.
Nothing suggested that the number of deaths would increase with the Moroccan Gendarmerie already at work.
But the rescue turned disastrous.
One of the Moroccan agents, Bolívar narrates, put Martínez on a stretcher.
“I realized that this did not work.
The man was not going to be able to handle an old iron stretcher, weighing 50 or 60 kilos, plus José Antonio's 80”, he points out.
The gendarme, he continues, "got caught on the stretcher and fell into the water of the river below, very cold from the thaw": "José Antonio had his head out, but the rest of his body was submerged."
The agent left, leaving the police submerged, and did not return until morning.
When starting the ascent with the stretcher again, it escaped him again until he fell down a waterfall of several meters.
The autopsy, carried out in Spain, indicated that he died of drowning, probably during the night.
On Sunday, the two deceased and the survivor were finally removed from the canyon.
Two days later, Bolívar returned to Spain.
He spent two weeks at home.
“The first, sheltered by the family.
The second time, everyone had to go back to work, and I spent the mornings alone, so I immediately went back to work”, he says.
He received psychological help and, judging by appearances, he remains strong.
That same summer he already began to go out to the field.
Since then, he continues with his work as a police officer on the streets of Madrid without abandoning his trips to the mountains.
“I have more respect, but it's what I've been doing since I was 12 years old,” he says.
He and his family have already recovered.
He just had a daughter in August.
The only objection is put by his mother, who is very well, but "he has not read the book, nor will he read it, nor does he want to talk about it."
Judicially, there was an attempt by Baltasar Garzón, as a lawyer, to start a process to determine what happened and who was guilty.
Not an inch was advanced and nothing has ever been investigated.
Juan Bolívar, for his part, says that he has not returned to Morocco, but he does not rule it out.
"I want to close the circle by finishing at some point a route that was left incomplete," he concludes.
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