. We like to marvel at great buildings, those that occupy the pages of magazines and are celebrated in brilliant inaugurations, but architecture as a primary form, as an ancient intuition, is born in the house. Neither in the tower nor in the temple nor in the amphitheater. At home. In the immediate need to draw a boundary between what is outside and what must remain inside. The first caves, the first tipis, the first circular forts—because it was the simplest way to draw a line with a rope attached to a stick, with a gesture that we can still reproduce on wet earth or sand—were already a form of architecture. And that shape was neither decorative nor symbolic. It was practical. It was defensive. She was human.
Then came everything else. The classic porticos, the Doric columns, the cross vaults, the glass skyscrapers, the data centers that breathe like thermal beasts in the suburbs. We can, stadiums and even space stations—if that is architecture, which it is. We can build buildings that defy gravity, that rotate on themselves, that sink into the earth or that float on the sea. We will also build dams to feed them energy and waterways to protect them from floods and highways and railways to connect them. But none of that erases the essential: everything begins at home. All engineering is built in the service of human beings—that is, architecture. And all architecture is, deep down, a variation of the house. Because the house is not just a place. It’s an anchor. A physical structure that guarantees, even if symbolically, a certain continuity of the self. The house is the place to which one returns. The place where you sleep without weapons, where you keep the irrelevant—a postcard, a bill from four months ago, a spoon that no one wants to throw away—, where the routine is repeated until it stops seeming routine. There are those who say that the house is an extension of the body. Could be. But it is also an extension of trust.
The first houses were born for that. To protect us. From the animals, from the enemies, from the cold, the wind and the rain. There was no other function. There was no property or aesthetics, nor was there a market. Just need. And that need was drawing shapes. Simple first. Then less simple. But always around the same idea: delimiting an interior where damage would not enter. That idea persists. Despite the square meters, the terraces, the urban planning regulations and the mortgage clauses. Through it all, home is still the place you go when all else fails. The house is the refuge. As it has been for centuries.
But 68 people died on the ground floors of their own homes.
There is something painful, yes, but also very disturbing, about dying because of your house. Not from dying in your house—that, in many cases, is almost an aspiration: closing your eyes in the same room where you learned to read, where your mother ironed with a mechanical gesture in front of the radio—but from dying because the house, yours, has become a trap. Because what was supposed to protect you—walls, doors, windows, locks, floors—has become an enclosing structure. Because the water has arrived and has not left. And you were inside.
A ground floor, in almost any part of l’Horta Sud, was not until recently a place perceived as vulnerable. It was, if anything, more accessible, cooler in summer, surely cheaper. Also noisier and more exposed. But it wasn’t dangerous. Many of these homes were not in marginal neighborhoods or particularly degraded areas. They were on streets with new streetlights, with recycling bins, with tobacconists and bakeries on the corner. Older people lived in some of those houses because they had always lived there. In others, recently arrived families, who had rented the ground floor because that was what there was. In all of them, when the water arrived, there was no clear alarm. Just an accumulation of signs that no one knew how to read in time because there was no time: the dull noise in the pipes or the devilish speed with which the water rose through the interior patio or the way in which the main door, once swollen and forced by the pressure coming from the other side, would no longer open. When they wanted to leave, they couldn’t. When they screamed, the water was up to their chests.
In some cases, the bodies were found hours later, when the level had dropped. Not floating, as in the crudest scenes of catastrophic cinema; sitting on the floor, slumped against a wall, as if they had decided to give up at some point in the process. As if they had understood—too late—that the house was no longer on their side.
That image is of a very specific violence. Because of its meaning. For everything that precedes it: the idea that the most intimate place, the one that contains your routine, your clothes, your charger cables folded in on themselves, your frames with photos from a decade ago, can become a capsule with no way out from one moment to the next. Like a sealed elevator. Like an airtight drawer. Like a coffin.
It is possible that some of those houses had already had warnings: old dampness or minor leaks, perhaps puddles that slipped under the door every time it rained more than necessary. Small signs ignored. Not out of irresponsibility, but out of habit. Because no one builds a house thinking about its ability to kill. Nobody rents a ground floor asking how many centimeters above sea level the threshold is. No one imagines that any given October afternoon can end up with water up to neck height. But that’s exactly what happened. And it didn’t go far. It was not in remote places, without coverage and without updated plans. It was in the towns surrounding Valencia. On streets with names. In illuminated corners. In houses where that same morning someone had made coffee, ironed a shirt, watered a plant.
They died inside the house. But not because his time had come.
This is an excerpt from ‘‘, the latest book by Pedro Torrijos. A text that tries to look again at the people who lived through the catastrophes. Do not convert them into an anonymous mass of data and figures, but remember their daily gestures, those that turned them into human beings.
