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Life in Spanish bull-running town returns to normal after "worst floods"

10 June 2013 23:40 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Life is slowly returning to normal in the Spanish city of Pamplona on Monday after what the city mayor describes as the "worst floods" in the history of the bull-running town on Sunday, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Pamplona, in the north of Spain with a population of around 250,000, is famous for its San Fermin festival at the start of July, which was made popular by the writer Ernest Hemmingway in his book 'The Sun Also Rises'.

However, any bulls in the city streets on Sunday would have found themselves having to swim rather than run after heavy rainfall caused the river Arga which flows through the city to overflow and burst its banks at several points of the city.

The river rose by around 2.5 meters as the volume of water being transported reached 630 cubic meters a second, before dropping back to a more normal level of just over 100 cubic meters per second on Monday.

The rapidly rising water didn't cause fatalities, but caused people to be evacuated from their homes and widespread damage to property which has only just begun to be assessed.

Meanwhile the mayor of Pamplona, Enrique Maya, was astonished by the volume of water which had hit the city.

"Old people tell me they have seen nothing like it and the data that has been collected since we began to keep official records also show nothing like this. It is the biggest flood in the history of Pamplona," said Maya.

Maya added that now was the time to evaluate the damage, explaining that many garages were still under water," he did assure that authorities were working around the clock to ensure things returned to normal, although he also lamented that there had also been a flood in the city in January in what has been an exceptionally wet winter and spring in the north of Spain.

"It seems as if it is raining where it is already wet," he said, before adding that the San Fermin Fiestas, which are important for the town's economy as tens of thousands of people descend on Pamplona for a week of all-out partying, were not in jeopardy.

"There is more than enough time to recover everything that the 'fiesta' will be celebrated with normality," confirmed Maya.