On October 22, 1965, a disastrous whistle began with a dismal sound in the working-class town of Saltos de Torrejón el Rubio, province of Cáceres, that at least some of the employees who at that time were working on the construction of the dams on the Tajo and Tiétar rivers have been fearing for days. About the nine twenty in the morning, while the children were hurrying through their breakfasts to leave for school, the hum of a siren began to resonate. The warning siren. The same one that screamed to warn of accidents. The problem is that that autumn morning Accident could very well have been written like that, with a capital letter.
The discreet, humble and remote working-class town of the municipality of Torrejón el Rubioin the heart of Monfragüe, has just served as the setting that many still consider today as the worst work accident occurred in the history of Spain.
A monumental work
That is what the Franco dictatorship intended in the mid-1960s with the works in the channels of the Tiétar and Tagus rivers, to carry out an enormous reference work in Europe. It was the stage of developmentalism and only a few years earlier, in 1959, the regime had had to deal with the Ribadelago catastrophecaused by the failure of a dam that took away 144 residents of the Zamoran town. In Extremadura he wanted to make amends.
The project developed in Cáceres was certainly important. Neither more nor less than building two dams between the channels of the Tagus and Tiétar rivers, along with a huge canal between both infrastructures to transfer water and generate electricity. By October 1965 the works were already more than advanced.
It is estimated that about 4,000 workers between 1959 and 1966, many of them residents of surrounding towns who found in the project a way to avoid emigration. In 2020, the anthropologist Manuel Trinidad he explained to elDiario.es that works of this type came to form a kind of guild, “the pantaneros”, who moved from one side of Extremadura to the other.
The Negratín reservoir, in Granada. (Unsplash)
To accommodate the workers who shaped the infrastructure for seven years, two towns were built, “the one upstairs”, designed for company officials and managers; and another for the laborers. Proof that it was an authentic town is that they had services such as a school, commissary, dining room, chapel, church and even a tavern, tobacco shop and a Civil Guard barracks. The Extremadura Newspaper precise that the person in charge of the construction was Agromán and the work was carried out for Hidroeléctrica Española, today Iberdrola.
What happened? A combination of factors. One in which the meteorology is combined and everything indicates that negligence of those responsible for the project. The previous weeks had been especially rainy, which little by little caused the water level of the swamp to rise until it was barely 83 centimeters of the maximum authorized level. That the level and pressure rose did not mean, however, that the workers stopped working on the canal and the river bed.
The inhabitants of the town were in fact preparing to witness quite a spectacle, like I would recognize years later one of the victims The Country: “Seeing the waterfalls of foaming water from the spillways for the first time.” It wasn’t like that. And what was expected to be a spectacle ended up being revealed as a branch. The pressure of the dammed liquid was such that a cofferdam ended up bursting. 14 tons that protected the pumping tunnel. Result: a violent torrent of water that ended up flooding the conduit, the underground plant and galleries. With everything that this implies.
And the workers?
That is one of the keys to the tragedy. In the flooded canal between the Tagus and Tiétar dams, crews of workers continued to work and could do little to avoid the violence of the water. Not only that.
The torrent expanded with such force that it ended up taking with it other employees who were toiling in the dry river bed. It is estimated that at that point alone there were some 400 people when the tragedy occurred. The force and speed of the water made it difficult for even them to get to safety. The event was so dramatic that it forced the town to be evacuated and rescue efforts to begin.
“My father and many other workers were seeing him coming. He dreamed at night. He repeated many times: something is going to happen and it is going to be very bad. They want to try working with us,” remembers Flori Almendral in statements collected by The Jump. She is not the only one who retains memories of that episode. Paqui Martos tells for the same report how they managed to throw a rope to save a young man who was floating in a well. “It held on tightly with such bad luck that when it came out it broke.” His fate, he continues, was known shortly after: “15 days later we found him with the rope in his hands.”
With the memory of what happened in Ribadelago still fresh, the Franco regime decided to silence the Monfragüe accident. The incident occurred on October 22 and on November 1 the NO-DO dedicated a brief space of 37 seconds to the news, remember The Daily Leapbehind a chronicle about a ball of the Barcelona bourgeoisie. Newspapers of the time, such as Above, Town either Alreadythey also passed on tiptoe about the tragedy.
They officially recognized 54 fatalitiesbut there are those who raise the total number of deaths and missing people in the 1965 accident well above that figure, to more than a hundred. Specifying the exact amount is complicated. The workers remember that they moved 75 coffins and they were not enough to accommodate all the corpses. Some they even hold that political prisoners were used in the construction of the dams and in the cemeteries of the area there are still bodies of victims that no one came to claim at the time.
The regime decided to settle the matter without blame, nor practically any compensation for the widows and orphans left behind by the tragedy. In 1970, three years after the opening of the dam, the Provincial Court decided dismiss the case “because the perpetration of the crime did not appear justified” and the wives of the workers who lost their lives in the incident received a ridiculous sum, of just 20,000 pesetasto which they could add another 5,000 for each orphan in their care. To receive the money it was not enough to have suffered the accident; They had to meet another requirement: renounce any complaint.
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The Country remember that the regime was still fresh about what happened in Ribadelago and was not willing to echo the incident in the middle of the reservoir construction boom. Behind the Extremadura project there were also important companies run by even more important families. Not long after the accident the dam began operating without inauguration. The result was that the dictatorship silenced what happened.
Half a century later, in 2015, the town of Malpartida de Plasencia decided to at least rescue the history of the tragedy and installed a monolith to remember the victims. In addition to politicians, some relatives of the victims attended the inauguration. “I was at the village school and when we heard the siren the teacher told us that we had to go to the hill, we were there for 10 hours waiting for news, always hoping to see our father appear,” remembered Manuel Pérezat that time a boy of just 12 years old. It wasn’t like that. When the hatch gave way under the pressure, his father was barely a hundred meters away.
Cover image | Commons
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was originally published in
Xataka
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Carlos Prego
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