A Year After the Deadly Valencia Floods, a Photographer Reflects on the Damage of the Albufera Natural Park

Every home in Spain still remembers the images from the devastating floods that hit the Valencia region on October 29 last year: people stranded in their cars, standing on top of roofs, and entire villages washed away by the brown, muddy flood waters. In some places, a year's worth of rain fell in eight hours, producing walls of water that swept away everything in its path. The catastrophic floods were caused by a weather phenomenon called DANA — Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos in Spanish or Isolated High-Level Depression in English — typical in this area during the fall season when cold air blows over the still-warm Mediterranean, pushing the hotter air upward quickly and forming dense clouds that remain in one area dumping torrential rains for hours. Last year, they were made more extreme by a combination of climate change and warmer-than-usual sea surface temperatures.

The DANA disaster claimed 228 lives, ruined more than 75,000 homes and caused €17 billion in economic damage as businesses and livelihoods were destroyed. One year later, many still haven’t been able to return home as the region’s construction workers have more work than they can keep up with.

When flooding strikes, these are the damages we tend to remember: the buildings and infrastructure destroyed, the billions it will take to rebuild. But there’s also a tremendous cost to nature and the surrounding ecosystems. The weeks after the floods, Carlos Gonzalo Gil, a 26-year-old photographer with a degree in environmental sciences from the University of Valencia, set out to document the impact of the DANA on Albufera Natural Park — a place where he spent a lot of his childhood. His pictures of the DANA’s devastating impact on the park have appeared in the Levante-EMV newspaper and were featured in a “Cultura Inquieta” exhibition in Madrid.

“Through my work, I want to connect science and visual storytelling to inspire reflection and action on climate and environmental issues,” Gonzalo Gil says.

Below are some of the photos he took of the natural park in the weeks and months following the catastrophic and deadly floods, and a short Q&A interview with the photographer.

Why was it important to you to not only document the impact of the disaster on towns and villages, but also on the Albufera Natural Park?
The focus of my photography has changed and evolved from bird and nature photography to documenting the growing impacts of climate change. For me, it was also a personal problem that affected my family’s vacation home and the homes of my friends. I saw a lot of people with cameras, especially on TV, documenting the first week following the DANA, but then they disappeared. In the following weeks, nobody was in the field with their camera, and I needed to do that for myself. Everyone was in the catastrophic Zone 0 [the area most badly hit by the floods], but no one was in the natural park.

Most images were from towns. But in my case, I wanted to show what had happened to the Albufera Natural Park, which is really close to Valencia city. The devastation to the park was difficult for me to witness because it's the natural park or the wetland where I grew up — my parents love them and I’ve been going there since I was a child.

It’s the worst disaster affecting the natural park since it was created in 1986. And I think wetlands are so powerful, they provide incredible ecosystem services to nature, but also to the population. Now there’s just so much trash there that it will become part of the wetland, including plastics, microplastics and pellets — and it’s going to affect the habitat and the ecosystem.

Why do you think more disaster coverage should focus on the impact on nature? 
We tend to think about the impact of houses and infrastructure first, but nature, and especially the Albufera Natural Park, doesn’t have the same resources or opportunities for reconstruction as towns and streets. While the volunteers were out on the streets in Zone 0 from day one, it took people a month to go to the park and start addressing the devastation there. The pollution, including plastics and pharmaceutical products from nearby factories, will be the worst for the park. I think that both the central and regional governments have all the necessary resources to coordinate efforts and attend to every kind of zone in the Valencian territory affected by the DANA, but they haven’t done enough; better coordination amongst different administrations is also needed.