The singer-songwriter María Rozalén, the most illustrious adopted daughter that the beautiful and tiny Albacete municipality of Letur (929 inhabitants) has produced, in the heart of the Segura mountain range, suspended her entire professional agenda and took the car to her hometown early in the morning on Thursday the 31st, “preyed by anxiety and seeing that I could not articulate a single word.” The families of his three uncles who continue to reside in the village have not suffered damage, and their houses, although water has entered, “will be able to live normally again.” But he knew (“as it could not be otherwise”) the six deceased and missing, and had to face “the brutal drama.” “The woman they found 12 kilometers away yesterday was a friend of my mother, from her gang. The first one that appeared was from my grandmother’s country house, and the pain is particularly immense in the case of Monica and Jonathan, a couple my age whose house collapsed on top of them. They leave behind two small children. In the town, even if you don’t have direct disappearances, we are all very screwed.”
Rozalén is 38 years old (she was born in Albacete and spent her childhood in Letur) and had known torrential downpours, but nothing even remotely similar to what happened on the fateful Tuesday the 29th. The author of songs like The violet door and promoter of the Leturalma festival—which has seven editions and in July brings together nearly 8,000 people a day for three days—faced “the greatest shock” upon verifying that the very physiognomy of the town had changed. “The oldest people had experienced some floods, small overflows, but this was a wild tsunami, the end of the world. It is a very rough scar. The road that leads into the old town has been destroyed. There is a nine-meter sinkhole at the entrance. On Sunday, back in Madrid, the image of people crying while their buildings had just been demolished remained in my mind. And it could have been much worse in the bridge area, or if the La Parra bar, into which a van crashed, had been open.”
Everyone who has seen her these days in Letur asked her what could be done to repair such damage, but she still does not have the ideas organized in her head. “It’s my childhood, it’s my life. And now it has become a horror movie.” He has canceled the presentation of the next edition of Leturalma, which he was going to hold in a few weeks in Toledo, but he doesn’t even know whether to suspend the 2025 festival or face it with more strength than ever. “It will depend on what the townspeople ask for. I can only say that all the fellow artists who had my personal cell phone have written to me these days to tell me to count on them for whatever I needed.”
The artist from Leture highlights, precisely, that feeling of unconditional solidarity as the only encouraging thing about these painful days. “While you shit on everything,” he exclaims, at times containing tears, “it’s beautiful to highlight the beautiful part, how people have opened their houses wide to those who have been left homeless.” As Letur has been an isolated case in the Castilian-La Mancha geography, all the security forces, rescue teams and volunteer networks have worked in a lightning-fast manner. “On Saturday there were so many people helping with the cleaning that you didn’t even know where to stand so as not to get in the way. And that same day we began to send food and clothing to Valencia, because we already had everything…”.
Rozalén’s last concert to date in Valencian lands comes to mind, last September 27 at the Catarroja festival, precisely one of the municipalities affected by the dana. “It was so beautiful, there was such a great atmosphere of camaraderie… And now…, I don’t know how they are going to get out of this.” And the singer who has half a dozen albums and almost three decades giving voice to so many causes and stories is definitely left speechless.