The image was dramatic.
Two young people with hats were trying to attract attention with their arms so that they would be taken out of their balcony, the place in their house where they went to take refuge and which became a mousetrap.
All the televisions focused on them.
The neighbors on the street looked with expectation and nervousness at what was happening to them.
It wasn't fast at all.
It was eternal.
Two hours of anguish in which they saw how the fire was getting closer to them and how the firefighters, from a distance, were protecting them as best they could with the water from their hoses.
They are Sara, from Portugal, and Amar, from Belgium, the couple who was rescued by firefighters after spending all that time on the balcony of their apartment in the burning building in the Campanar neighborhood of Valencia.
Not a day later, they recount those critical hours.
“It was a very emotionally charged situation.
“We spent two and a half hours on the terrace, but now we are alive, which is what matters.”
Sara and Amar, the couple rescued from the fire, spoke to the media this Friday in Valencia. Punt
They are affected.
They have lost everything, but they hold on to the most important thing they still have left: life.
They had been living rented in the damaged building for a year.
“Because of our jobs, we could have lived anywhere in the world, but we chose Valencia for its quality of life.
We did not expect that something like this could happen to us,” they said.
The couple, whose rescue was received with applause among the neighbors who were evacuated from the building, explained in statements to Valencian television À Punt that they were “at the mercy of the firefighters.”
In fact, they thanked them for “risking their lives” to help them and recalled how they put out the fire that surrounded them on the upper and lower floors so that they would be “protected.”
“It was a very stressful moment.
We didn't want to burn to death, we were at the mercy of the firefighters," they added.
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The maneuver to rescue these two people, who had been on the balcony since the start of the fire, was carried out with two cranes: one controlled the fire on the lower floors, while the other approached to be able to remove them through the balcony.
In the end, after two and a half very long hours, they achieved it.
Although it wasn't easy.
Throughout the afternoon, several firefighters were cooling the area where the couple was trapped with jets of water to lower the temperature and prevent the fire from approaching them, which was just on the floor above and came to surround them. .
The fire had started at 5:30 p.m. in a building in the Campanar neighborhood.
A day later it is known that 10 people lost their lives, including a family made up of a father, a mother, a three-year-old girl and a baby who was barely 15 days old.
The residents of the area have dedicated themselves to the cause and have opened strategic points to receive food or clothing and thus deliver them to those affected who have lost everything to the flames.
“We can't cope.
People are turning.
"They are bringing us everything," says one of the young falleras from the Maestro Rodrigo commission, based in the Alquería de Rico, which serves people who keep arriving with shopping carts, suitcases or shopping bags.
“What do you need, what am I going to buy, I don't have anything at home,” asks Maricarmen, an older woman who lives in front of the damaged building.
“Yesterday was hell.
I can't even speak yet,” she laments.
The girls encourage her and ask her, above all, for underwear of all sizes and personal hygiene and hygiene products.
She also has diapers and slippers and dog food, but no food in general, water or medication is needed.
The boxes are stacked in several rows waiting for a van to pick them up.
The survivors appreciate it, of course, although they know that what is important, what is emotional, will never be recovered.