Valencia Floods: We’re All Valencians Now

By Max Milano

I'm standing on the beach, but the beach is gone. Instead of miles of white sand and clear blue Mediterranean waters, there are now massive piles of debris stretching along the coast, fading into the horizon.

The debris is stacked high in mounds, separated by lower stretches of rubble. It looks like the city bulldozers, usually here at dawn to smooth the sand, came early to build a grim mountain range of broken things.

I walk up to the first pile, hardly believing it.

Yesterday, this was still a beach—sand, surf, and the occasional beach bar. Now, the sand lies buried under rubble, reeds, baby flip-flops, and car panels, all washed down from the devastating Valencia floods, 40 miles up the coast.

Som Tots Valencians Ara

(We’re All Valencians Now)

A Beat poem by Max Milano

I'm standing on the beach,
but the beach is gone—
a memento mori, covered in reeds like bones
strewn on and on.
They blanket the sand;
now only tears cover the land.

Yesterday, still a beach—
now buried beneath death, as far as the eye can reach.
Baby shoes, car panels, tangled trees,
shoes that only yesterday harbored feet.

And it's the shoes that get you—
each one a question mark,
a loss true and stark,
always single, never in pairs,
a loss almost too hard to bear.

The king came,
his wife got mud on her face;
the people see through the falsehoods again and again.

We're expats here,
the lucky ones who were spared,
luckier still to be here
with these joyful people of fallas, paella, and song,
open-hearted and strong.
They're Spain's beach bums,
welcoming strangers,
making you feel at home—
my kind of people, full of grace.

Ready to go and help themselves,
to help their neighbors,
they come in droves.
No one here will feel alone.

Yes, we're all Valencians now, one and the same,
sharing the joy, sharing the pain.

You can't deny what nature makes,
but greed just takes and takes and takes.
Climate denied,
the river wild—
the rains will come
and leave but tears.

But all Valencians
are volunteers;
they come in thousands
to help their peers.

We are all Valencians now—
do not despair.

 I wander along the mounds, looking for signs of life in the tangled wreckage: a lone tennis shoe, a pillow torn from someone’s bed, a twisted chunk of a jeep’s bonnet jutting out from a heap of bamboo. Massive tree trunks batter the shore, like wrecked ships from another age. People wander along the debris, dazed, lost in thought.

Some have begun collecting bits of plastic, piling them separately. Each piece tells a story: a car panel, broken plastic tubing, a street sign, gas canisters, chunks of sofas. But it’s the shoes that haunt you. Always single shoes, never pairs.

Children’s shoes, adult shoes, flip-flops, basketball sneakers, dress shoes. Each shoe, a question mark.

A body was found on the next beach over, tangled in reeds. I overhear a group of women on their morning walk, whispering of a government cover-up. They say the real death toll must be in the thousands.

We’re expats here, and fortunate ones at that. Our beach community was spared. Now, our beach is a somber memento mori covered in debris that will linger for months—a small price.

It's been two weeks since the floods. Today, we had to go into town for an errand, following a convoy of fire trucks and police. Nothing could prepare us for the devastation along the V-31 freeway on Valencia's outskirts.

Traffic crawls along. To our left, it’s complete destruction. A commercial area with car dealerships, supermarkets, hotels—now looking like a war zone.

Thousands of cars, caked in mud, pile against storefronts. Most dealership lots have emptied as their glass doors collapsed under the mud’s force.

One car is half-buried inside a showroom window. A Carrefour parking lot looks like a scene from a post-apocalyptic film: mangled cars, thick layers of mud. Somewhere in this chaos is an Ikea, likely no better off.

Across the freeway, fields are littered with wrecked cars stranded in strange places. You wonder how a car got so far into the field, then remember—it was the water.

Errant cars lie everywhere, half-buried under bridges, down in creeks, some completely submerged in mud. They keep finding bodies out in the lagoon, some still inside their cars. We keep driving. There’s no stopping here. The police wave us on.

We’re all Valencians now. These joyful people of fallas, fireworks, and paella—who welcome strangers and don’t care if most expats never learn Valencian-Catalan. They’re the beach bums of Spain—Madrid’s beach—my kind of people.

When we first moved here from California, we couldn’t believe there could be two places in the world where the mountains, palm trees, and orange groves felt so familiar. But it’s the differences that make this place special—and also make it hard.

As American expats, we can’t help but wonder if this tragedy would have been better managed in California, where they have a grim familiarity with natural disasters.

The consensus here is that the warning came too late. People were hit by a wall of water at rush hour, and most died in their cars, some at home, some at work.

My mind keeps going back to a coffee shop made from a shipping container in the courtyard of the Bonaire shopping mall right outside Valencia. A few weeks ago, we had coffee there, chatting with the Cuban barista. He’d recently left Cuba, working hard to bring his mother here, away from the blackouts and food shortages.

It was the same Bonaire mall we saw in the news, flooded up to the second floor. Witnesses saw cars floating from the outdoor parking lot with people clinging to their roofs, only to be swept into the underground parking by the force of the water.

That container coffee shop is now buried under the mud. I hope our Cuban barista is safe. I hope some greedy corporation didn’t make him work on a day there was a red alert for rain and flooding.

We hear about protesters confronting Mercadona’s owner because they never recalled their delivery vans, despite the alerts. One of their vans now lies buried in river mud. An Amazon van too. Workers dead because capital must grow at all costs. I’m no commie, but this truth is stark—and right in front of our eyes.

The king came, and his wife got a ball of mud on her face. People see through the farce. They moved the river away from the wealthy part of town, but they never fixed the creek that flooded. Climate deniers run the local government, so people die.

Someone on the news says the firemen are at the Bonaire shopping mall and that the underground parking lot is a cemetery. They don’t know how many cars and bodies are down there, mangled and encased in mud.

I feel sad for our Cuban barista. To flee one disaster only to land in another.

Someone else in the news talks about refrigerated trucks with bodies being sent to Madrid for autopsies because the local morgue can’t handle it. This gives me flashbacks. Los Angeles, 2020. Refrigerated trucks with bodies and Forest Lawn cemetery filling up at an alarming pace. Now we are here. More of the same. The danse macabre never ends.

But we are all Valencians now. They have welcomed us into their family, and like all Spanish families, you have to be there for the fiestas and for the sad times. Being an expat is not being on eternal vacation—this is your life now, and these are your people.

This morning, we went for a walk in our local beach community and saw the "Bon Nadal" signs up. They were all over town. Nothing says we are family and now this is home more than that. It may be a sad Christmas, a subdued one. But it’s the sense of community that matters, and Valencia and the Valencians have shown that they have it in droves.

Som tots valencians ara.

Stay tuned to GuiriGuru for more Spain explorations and expat travel tips and stories.

Max Milano is a travel writer, beat poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles, California, and Valencia, Spain. He is the author of Daughter of Recoleta and Hollywood Expats. His latest photography and beat poetry book, Mexico City Noir, Life Under The Volcanoes, is Available on Amazon. Bookings and Prints of his photographs are available at MaxMilanoPix.

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