Italians di Beppe Severgnini 
Il Twitter del direttore 
The passengers were nearly all asleep, after 24 hours of partying at the “Las Fallas” festival in Valencia. With bonfires on the beach, fireworks, the burning of giant papier-mâché monuments, and partying crowds in the streets and on the seafront, the St. Joseph’s Day celebrations in Valencia are an extremely popular event. The “Night of Fire” is one of Spain’s most popular traditional festivals.
So many had signed up for the excursion organised by the Erasmus Student Network of the University of Barcelona that they had to lay on five coaches. The students set off at 6.15 on Saturday morning from Plaza de España, arriving at 11 in Valencia, and were free to enjoy the street parties until late into the night, eat paella, and watch the fireworks, joining tens of thousands of other spectators for “la Cremà”, the final gigantic bonfire that lights up the sky until dawn. The coaches for the return journey to Barcelona were scheduled to leave between 3.30 and 4.00 am yesterday morning. Tickets for the trip were priced at €20, excluding meals.
By about 6.00 am, the last coach in the convoy returning to Barcelona was shrouded in silence. All the passengers had finally dozed off. Dennis, a 23-year-old Dutch student, told how he was awoken by a sudden shaking: “The coach seemed to be zigzagging, swerving across the road. Then there was a violent impact, panic and screaming. We waited over two hours before help arrived.”
Outside the Corona Hotel in Tortosa, where unharmed passengers, those with minor injuries, and the families of victims were taken, and were being helped by psychologists, a Mexican student, Victor Manuel Pano Torres, 21, could not remember anything. “We started off at around 4.00 am. I don’t even know who was sitting next to me, and I fell asleep right away. I was woken up by the crash,” he told reporters. He was limping and wearing a neck brace, but his main concern was to send a text message to his family in Mexico, so they would not worry in the morning, when they heard the news of the tragedy.
There were some, like one German student, who were unable to come to terms with what had happened to their friends. Injured, but alive, he was clearly distraught, telling a reporter from El Mundo that “I should have tried to do something to save them”, as he waited in front of the Joan XXIII hospital in Tarragona to be transferred to Barcelona for specialist maxillofacial treatment. There was also anger among the survivors, as a girl reacted to attempts to comfort her by asking: “Are we supposed to consider ourselves lucky because we survived? What a paradox!”
It was not yet time to mourn, nor to give into grief, as the 26 students who had survived the terrible crash, only hours before, were asked by investigators for help in identifying the victims. They were of course free to refuse, but it was important to give names to the dead women, and to notify their families abroad. Two of the victims in particular, whose bodies rescuers had struggled to remove from the wreckage, proved difficult to identify. After nine positive identifications, forensic experts were at a dead end, and by the evening four of the women still remained unnamed.
There was a passenger list, but on the return journey some of the students had changed coaches to be with their friends, forcing others to find a place on a different coach. To further complicate matters, not all of the passengers had their documents on them, having put them in their bags and backpacks.
Not all those who walked away unscathed were in a condition to cooperate, however, with some struggling to answer doctors’ questions, and one Italian student in such a state of shock that she was unable to speak.
English translation by Simon Tanner
www.simontanner.com