As it happened last year, February has come again bringing with it some interesting weather to the north of Spain. This time we have had severely heavy rains, to the point where several rivers overflowed, small landslides partially obstructed various roads of the region and some places flooded completely. During the first weekend of February experts said it rained the amount of water expected for the whole month of January.
After the storm, -because there were storms too-, the calm didn’t come. Instead, we had cold and even snow at 200m above sea level. Normally some hail might fall and stay on the roads for half an hour maximum, so snowing is strange here where we are so close to the coast. However, this time it hailed and snowed a lot. Some schools had to close, people had problems commuting every day to their jobs and snowploughs were working around the clock but just couldn’t cope with the amount of snow that was falling. The blizzards were so strong in some places that just after the snowploughs had cleaned the roads they were covered white again immediately. Over 200 people had to be rescued from their cars stuck on the A67, the motorway used to drive south towards Madrid, which later was officially closed for several days.
On Friday we helped a friend to get home. The night before she had had to stay with us because it would have been impossible for her to get back home (at just 460m altitude) after work on Thursday night. Her family was waiting for her with no way of communicating as mobile and landline networks and the internet connection had been down since Wednesday afternoon. So on Friday we woke up early and drove two 4x4s to the point where it would have been dangerous to keep driving even using chains, as the road from that point was very steep. We made the last 2km walking up the hill and finally got her home sweet home.
Photo below by Manuel Samperio
We were glad to arrive and stayed there for a couple of hours. We couldn’t leave without making a snowman, so all together, with the help of her kids, we made a big one in their garden.
We headed back down the hill very fast, some faster than others as my dad used a pair of skis! We were accompanied by the family dog, Zabba, who was making sure we arrived safely to the bottom of the hill where we had left the cars. In rough conditions like the ones we have had these days we humans surely find some difficulties in our daily lives, however, animals are different and they can prove to us their skills are much better than ours in the snow. Oh, and they can look really beautiful against a white natural background too.
