A British driver dies as flash floods hit Catalonia and Valencia

Catalan firefighters recovered a man's body on Thursday morning in Olivella, about 40 kilometres west of Barcelona. The car he had been driving was found first, carried down the Begues stream, a channel that is usually dry. The body lay about 500 metres farther on, in undergrowth. Mossos d'Esquadra said the driver was about 48. Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office later confirmed that the dead man was a British national who lived in the town. His wife was informed.

A witness told police the man had left the car after it stuck in the current and was then swept away. The emergency call came at 11:03 pm on Wednesday. Eleven units worked the search, with drones and the fire service's water and underwater team. The body was found a little more than three hours later.

The storm was not a single cell. Spain's weather service AEMET had already put a red alert on the Barcelona coast. Catalonia's civil protection unit sent a phone alert to Barcelona around 9:30 pm. An alert covering the belt west of the city, including Olivella, went out around 11 pm, the same window in which the driver was lost. Catalan president Salvador Illa offered condolences and pointed to the alerts that did go out.

By 7 am Thursday the fire department had taken 270 calls. The 112 line logged 1,116 calls covering 687 incidents. Barcelonès accounted for 716 of those calls, Garraf 97, Baix Llobregat 73 and Vallès Occidental 66. Some Barcelona metro stations closed. Buses were diverted. Regional trains ran late. El Prat cancelled more than 20 flights.

Valencia took a shorter, harder burst. The AVAMET network recorded almost 96 litres per square metre in Torrent, a city of about 85,000 in Horta Sud, with 71 litres in 30 minutes. "Rarely have we seen such rainfall accumulations in 30 minutes," the association wrote. Emergency crews there logged 478 incidents, mostly flooded property, leaks and blocked roads. They pulled 15 people from a fast-food restaurant as water came in. Metro lines in the city stopped. The airport closed for several hours and sent about a dozen flights to Alicante. About 8,700 lightning strikes were counted in the Valencia region between 8 pm and 11 pm. At least one fire followed.

Residents in Torrent told AFP they had seen this pattern before and asked why the drains and the Barranco del Poyo still cannot take a half-hour cloudburst. The ES-Alert for the Valencia area went out at 10:08 pm, telling people to stay off the roads, keep away from ravines and move upstairs if water rose. Many said the message arrived after basements and the Parc Central tunnel were already full. The Poyo itself swelled at Paiporta but did not overtop.

That name still carries weight. The dana of October 2024 killed 232 people in the same province, a figure a Catarroja court has since been asked to review, with eight further deaths still under forensic study and the investigation extended to April 2027. Thursday's storm was smaller. It was large enough to put the same ravine back on television and to kill one man in a dry channel outside Barcelona.

AEMET had warned that the rain would follow Spain's hottest summer on record. The sequence is now familiar: baked ground, a late-summer Mediterranean plume, a red warning, a phone ping, and a watercourse that exists on maps as a flood channel and on Wednesday night as a river. The open question in Olivella is the gap between the Barcelona alert at 9:30 and the western alert at 11. That gap is now a file for civil protection, and for a British family.