What is a DANA? Why rain in Valencia can turn dangerous, and what to do when it does

We checked the figures below on 19 October 2026 against AEMET reports, the Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar (the river basin authority), the court files on the 2024 DANA and the Generalitat's websites. DANA Adam is still going on, so its totals will change.

What is happening now: DANA Adam

On 16 October AEMET, Spain's state weather agency, gave the first dangerous DANA of the season a name: Adam. On Sunday 18 October a red warning, the highest of the three levels, was in force from ten in the morning along the southern coast of Valencia province and the north of Alicante province. The Generalitat, the regional government, has sent out several ES-Alert messages since Saturday. The one on Monday morning read: "Avoid travel, do not go to areas that flood. Stay away from rivers, barrancos, seafront promenades and the coast." By then more than 500 litres per square metre, which is 500 mm of rain, had fallen on Pego, Real de Gandia, Villalonga and Barx in two days, over 600 in places. AEMET says it is the heaviest rainfall there since November 1987. A level two emergency has been declared, Monday's classes were cancelled in 42 municipalities, and a campsite in Jávea was evacuated. Two people have died, one in Sagunto and one in Catalonia, at Cabrera de Mar.

DANA Adam is a different storm, and 2024 has nothing to do with it. That is exactly what the word DANA means: something that comes to this coast every autumn.

What DANA means and why the older generation says gota fría

DANA stands for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, an isolated depression at high levels, what British forecasters call a cut-off low. Five to nine kilometres up, the jet stream that carries weather from west to east sometimes bends so sharply that a pocket of cold air breaks off from it. The pocket hangs over the Iberian Peninsula, or just off it, for several days. On its own it is harmless, and most DANAs pass unnoticed. The trouble starts when there is a warm sea underneath it and a wind from the east.

The older generation says gota fría, "cold drop". It is the same thing under an old name borrowed from German meteorology. In the mid-1980s the Spanish weather service switched to DANA. By then gota fría had come to mean "flood" in everyday speech, and the forecasters wanted a term for the atmosphere itself, with no flood built into it. The acronym also keeps the memory of Francisco García Dana, a meteorologist at the service who died in 1984. AEMET itself now writes the word in lower case, dana, and since 2025 it has been giving the dangerous ones names, as with hurricanes: Alice in October 2025, Adam on 16 October 2026.

On average fifteen DANAs a year form over the peninsula and the waters around it, anywhere from seven to twenty-six. That is the count made by geographers at the Complutense University of Madrid over a hundred years, from 1924 to 2023. Spring has the most. The longest, and the most dangerous for eastern Spain, come in autumn. Most bring heavy rain that Valencians wait out at home. A DANA turns dangerous when several conditions line up. On 29 October 2024 all of them did.

Why rain in Valencia turns dangerous within a few hours

The first condition is a warm sea. By the end of summer the Mediterranean along this coast is at its warmest of the year, and in September and October it is still feeding moisture into the air. The air that arrived in Valencia on 29 October 2024 had spent four days travelling over the sea from the Aegean, and the water along the way was two degrees warmer than normal, according to AEMET. Warm air holds more water. In September 2025 Jorge Tamayo, the head of AEMET in Valencia, spoke of a sea at 27 degrees where the season calls for 24.

The second is an easterly wind, the levante. It pushes moist air from the sea on to the land. Thirty or forty kilometres inland the air runs into the mountains and climbs, and at the top the cold pocket of the DANA is waiting. The temperature gap is enormous, and the moisture comes down as a wall of water. The storms run like a train, one cell after another down the same valley, for hours.

The third is the terrain. Water from the mountains runs down channels known here as barrancos and ramblas. These are ravines and riverbeds, dry for most of the year. People cycle along them, roads cross them, tunnels pass through them under the motorways. One channel can change its name along the way: Rambla de Chiva, then Rambla del Poyo, then Barranc de Torrent, all the way down to the Albufera. Before 2024 the Poyo had 99 documented floods, the first described in 1775. On a DANA day a river runs down a channel like that. Before DANA Alice, AEMET said as much: a risk of flash floods "in ramblas and dry riverbeds".

The fourth is the city. The towns of l'Horta Sud sit on the plain the channels cross on their way to the Albufera and the sea. Under the PATRICOVA plan, about 600,000 residents of the Valencia region, one in nine, live where water has already been. In Paiporta and Catarroja alone there are almost 17,000 such flats and houses. Tarmac absorbs nothing, and underground car parks and ground floors sit below street level. On the evening of 29 October 2024 the gauge on the Barranco del Poyo read 2,282 cubic metres of water a second and then stopped working. Scientists at the University of Valencia later calculated that the peak at Torrent was about 5,700 cubic metres a second, two Olympic swimming pools every second. The channel downstream is built for 800.

Now the main thing newcomers do not know. The danger comes from upstream. On 29 October 2024 the city of Valencia itself had 7.8 mm of rain in the whole day, the airport 14.4 mm. An ordinary grey day. In Turís, forty kilometres to the west, the same day brought 771.8 mm, with 184.6 mm in a single hour. That is a Spanish record for one hour. Chiva had 384 mm in five hours. Over the previous 21 months Turís had seen less rain than in that one day. By evening all of that water had come down the channels into Paiporta, Catarroja and Aldaia, where it had barely rained. So here you cannot judge the risk by the sky over your head. You judge it by the AEMET warning and by what is happening in the hills above you.

When DANAs come and how many rainy days there are in a year

The storm season runs from September to November, when the sea is still warm and the air high up is already cold. Autumn brings Valencia about 40% of its annual rainfall, and September and October are the wettest months. In the last ten years a red warning for rain has been issued in the Valencia region 23 times. Since 2024 there was one in March 2025 in inland Castellón, one at the end of September 2025 along the whole Valencia coast, one in October 2025 with DANA Alice in the south of Alicante and La Safor, and now DANA Adam. There is an old saying on this coast too: the flood comes in October.

And yet rainy days are few here. By AEMET's figures Valencia has 46 days a year with a millimetre or more of rain, and 475 mm over the year. Alicante has 37 days and 311 mm, Castellón 45 days and 467 mm. Kyiv gets about 620 mm a year, London 616, Berlin 581, and there it is spread across a hundred and fifty days. In Valencia the same water arrives in bursts. A single evening can bring a month's rain, and on 29 October 2024 Turís got one and a half times its annual total in one day.

Which also answers the question about wellies. You will wear them about three days a year. But keep a pair per adult and a head torch in the cupboard. In the week after a big storm they matter more than anything else you own.

How Valencians learned to respect rain: 1957, 1982, 1987

The attitude to heavy rain here is handed down through families, and it has dates.

On 14 October 1957 the Turia burst its banks and went through the centre of Valencia twice in one day. The official death toll was 81. Historians say a hundred or more, because there were shacks in the riverbed at the time. On Calle Doctor Olóriz the water rose above five metres, on Pintor Sorolla to 2.7 metres. Ceramic plaques reading Fins ací aplegà la riuà, "the flood reached this high", still hang on the façades of the old town, for instance on the Capitanía General building on Plaza de Tetuán. After the riada the city did something that now seems impossible: it took the river out of the city. The Plan Sur diverted the Turia into a new channel south of Valencia, opened in December 1969. The old riverbed became the Jardín del Turia park, and its first sections opened in 1986. Anyone who goes running through that park is running along the bed of a river that once drowned the city.

On 20 October 1982, after days of rain, the Tous dam on the river Júcar collapsed. The wave went through Alzira and Carcaixent, the water stood more than four metres deep, and over a hundred thousand people were left homeless. Eight deaths were recorded officially. The press puts it at 30 to 40. Here they call it la pantanà. It gave Spain the SAIH system of river level gauges and a network of weather radars. On 3 November 1987 Oliva had 817 mm of rain in a day, still a Spanish record. Then came Alicante in September 1997 with four dead, the Marina Alta in 2007, the Vega Baja in September 2019. And 29 October 2024, which AEMET calls the worst DANA flood in Spain this century.

So when AEMET issues a red warning, town halls close schools, parks and markets, and people stay at home. Someone who has moved here from Manchester, Dublin or Bergen sees this as overkill. Back home it rains half the year and nothing ever happens. The school is closed because of a ravine twenty kilometres away. In three hours it can be a river across the school bus route. The rain in your own street has nothing to do with it. Valencian sayings have been putting this for a long time: "do not build your nest by the river, and if you do, build it in summer" and "from the river, the rambla and the lord, the further the better".

The alert on your phone: what ES-Alert is and what to do when it arrives

ES-Alert is the state public warning system, and it has worked across Spain since February 2023. The message goes out from the mobile masts to every phone in the chosen area, with no app, no subscription and no need for anyone to know your number. You need a phone on Android 11 or iOS 15.6 or newer, and a top-level alert cannot be switched off. What to do when one arrives: read it, warn the people around you, do what it says, and then follow 112 and the radio.

On 29 October 2024 the alert reached phones at 20:11. The Barranco del Poyo had overflowed at 18:00, and most of the people who died were lost between 19:00 and 20:00. The message said only "avoid any travel in Valencia province", with not a word about garages or upper floors. In October 2026 the judge leading the case wrote that a message asking people to go upstairs, sent earlier, could have saved lives in La Torre. Since then the Generalitat has been sending ES-Alerts earlier and more often. In September 2025 the alert went out twelve hours before the red warning, by the end of 2025 there had been more than ten, and with DANA Adam the first two messages went out on Saturday, before the rain. So the siren from your phone now means one thing: read what it says and do it now. The current texts come down to three things. Do not get behind the wheel. Stay away from riverbeds, seafronts and low ground. Do not go down to garages or basements, and if water gets into the building, go up to the upper floors.

Alongside ES-Alert there are AEMET's colour warnings, and they are worth understanding. For the coast of Valencia and Alicante the thresholds are:

• Yellow: 20 mm in an hour or 60 mm in 12 hours. Low danger, heavy rain. No need to change your plans, but do not head for the mountains and do not park in a riverbed.
• Orange: 40 mm in an hour or 100 mm in 12 hours. Serious danger. Put off motorway journeys, move the car out of the underground car park to higher ground in the evening, collect the children early. In Valencia an orange warning closes 19 schools in flood-prone areas.
• Red: 90 mm in an hour or 180 mm in 12 hours. AEMET calls the danger "extraordinary". Stay at home. Town halls cancel classes, close parks, beaches and markets, and ask people to keep the roads clear for the emergency services.

Where to check the situation: warnings, roads, rivers

• AEMET warnings map and the AEMET app: the colour for each zone today and tomorrow, the rain radar, notifications for your town. This is the primary source, everything else repeats it.
• 112 Comunitat Valenciana, the @GVA112 account on X and the GVA 112 Avisos app: alerts, road closures, what to do, advice that works without internet. The app lets you save up to five addresses of your own.
• DGT road map and the @informacionDGT account: which roads are closed, where the traffic is stuck. Check it before any drive in the rain.
• SAIH Júcar: live water levels and flow in the rivers and barrancos of the Júcar basin. It shows whether water is on its way from upstream while it is still dry where you are.
• AVAMET: the Valencia region's network of amateur weather stations, hundreds of them. It shows how much has already fallen in the next village.
• Your town hall on X and Telegram (@AjuntamentVLC, @AlicanteAyto), Metrovalencia and EMT: closed parks, cancelled services, whether schools and markets are open.

Where the danger hides: garages, ground floors and roads across riverbeds

The 2024 DANA killed 237 people: 229 in the Valencia region, seven in Castilla-La Mancha, one in Andalusia. That is how many names were read out at the state memorial ceremony in October 2025, and the court in Catarroja is still adding people who died later from the effects of that night. Paiporta lost the most, 45, then Catarroja, 25, and Valencia, 17, almost all of them in the La Torre district. The court's breakdown of 221 victims shows where it happened: 68 people in their homes, 30 in garages, 5 in basements, 27 in the street, 15 on the roads, 11 in care homes. Almost half were 70 or older. Those figures are the map of what to be afraid of.

The garage. The most dangerous place in the building on a storm day. Water gets into an underground car park in minutes, the exit ramp floods first, and the doors stop opening under the pressure of the water. In 2024 people went down for the car and did not come back up. The car is insured, more on that below. If there is already water in the street, you do not go into the garage for anything. You do not use the lift either.

A ground floor near a riverbed. If the building stands in a dip or next to a barranco, then when a red warning is in force go up to neighbours on a higher floor early, before the water arrives. Do not wait for it to appear under the door.

A car on the motorway. At about seven in the evening on 29 October, in the rush hour, water from the Chiva barranco went over the high-speed railway line and hit the A-3 motorway with a wave that caught dozens of cars. A Guardia Civil officer who worked there called the motorway "a death trap". On the A-7 ring road at Quart de Poblet the Gallego channel tore up the carriageway, and hundreds of wrecked cars were left on the lanes. In Sedaví the V-31 turned into a car graveyard. There were 125,000 insurance claims for cars after that night. People kept driving in rain that was getting heavier, planning to turn off later, and at some point there was so much water on the road that the cars floated. The DGT rule is simple: you do not drive through a flooded road, even if it is a motorway and even if other people are doing it. With 20 centimetres of water a car is hard to control, at 30, which is more than half a wheel, it is swept away. You turn round before you reach the water. If you are already being carried, call 112, get out through the window and climb on to the roof, it is higher than the bonnet. And the DGT's main piece of advice: the best answer to a storm is to put the journey off.

Riverbeds and bridges. Do not go to look at the barranco, do not cross a flooded underpass, do not drive through the "puddle" where a country lane crosses a channel. There may be no road under the water.

The mountains. Rain that has fallen for several days washes out the slopes. Rocks come down on to the roads along the cliffs and verges give way. That is what our story is about.

And here is what there is no need to fear. Ordinary rain. A yellow warning. A walk through the centre of Valencia on an overcast day: the centre north of the new Turia channel is protected by a canal built for 5,000 cubic metres a second. Most DANAs end in wet feet and traffic jams. The 2024 flood was the worst in 67 years, and there is no reason to expect another like it every autumn. It is enough to know where you live and to have a plan for the evening when your phone goes off.

The rock on the road to Gestalgar: our story

I am the publisher of SunClub Network, and this happened to my husband and me. We had been in Valencia a little over two years and did not know things happen like this here. A couple of days before 29 October 2024 we set off in our motorhome for Gestalgar, a village an hour from the city, where the Turia runs between cliffs. The road to it is narrow and winds along the edge of a drop. It had been raining for several days, but that meant nothing to us.

On a bend we saw a rock in front of us. A huge chunk of cliff that had come down from above and taken up half the road. Our motorhome is seven metres long, and there was nowhere to go round. We got out and started pushing. It was almost impossible, but it gave by a few centimetres and we squeezed past. We drove on, pleased with ourselves for getting through.

The next day we went home. A day or two later the Turia at Gestalgar burst its banks and took the sports complex, the football pitch, the El Motor natural pool and the roads along the river. Only the viaduct, built after 1957, was left standing. The bridge over the Turia between Bugarra and Gestalgar was swept away entirely, and it took a year and a half to rebuild. In the province 146 of the 233 roads were damaged, 1,200 kilometres of them, and the Bugarra to Gestalgar stretch was closed again more than once afterwards because of rockfalls. We understood it later: the fallen rock was a warning that the mountain was already on the move. On days like that you do not go into the mountains, however beautiful the road. In a normal autumn the mountains are lovely. But you pick the day for them by the forecast.

What a family living here needs to know and to have

• Know your zone. The PATRICOVA flood map is open to everyone on the Generalitat's site, visor.gva.es. Look up your home, the children's school and the road between them. This matters more than any list of kit. The map was revised in October 2026: the risk zone in the areas hit by the DANA grew by 61%, and new houses there will be built almost a metre higher.
• Know where the nearest riverbed is and where the water from your street goes. Ask the older neighbours, they remember. And know where the mains switch and the water and gas taps are in your flat.
• Agree in the family who collects the children and where you meet if the phones are down. Decisions on schools are made by the town halls. The Conselleria, the regional education department, publishes the list of municipalities with no classes the evening before, and the school passes it on to parents.
• Ask at work in advance about working from home under orange and red warnings. The 112 service itself asks you to. Once an emergency has been declared, an employee has the right not to go in, and there is paid "climate leave" of up to four days.
• A three-day kit, as 112 advises: water, food that does not need a fridge, torches, a battery radio, a charger and a power bank, a first-aid kit, documents in one bag on a top shelf.
• Insurance. Flood damage in Spain is paid by the state Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros. Your own insurer only passes the claim on. There is one condition: some kind of policy on the flat or the car. For a car, basic third-party cover, a terceros, is enough, and those policies have included the Consorcio levy since July 2016. You file the claim at consorseguros.es or on 900 222 665, ideally within seven days, and there is no excess for homes and cars. Photograph your flat and your car in advance, on a calm day.
• One pair of wellies per adult and a head torch. You need them in the week after the storm, when the town is full of mud.

What to do on a storm day: the day before, during and after

The day before. In the evening check AEMET for tomorrow. Under an orange or red warning, move the car out of the underground car park to higher ground while it is still dry and light. Lift anything you would miss off the floor of the garage and the ground floor. Fill some bottles with water. Agree a day at home with work. For school, watch for the message from the town hall and the school.

During. Stay where it is high and dry. Do not drive. Do not go down to the garage or basement, and do not use the lift. If water comes into the building, go up the stairs. Do not go outside. Keep your phone for 112 and family, and leave the videos for another day. Listen to 112 and the town hall. Do not trust neighbourhood chats. In 2024 the chats spread "hundreds of bodies" in the Bonaire car park in Aldaia. The police said it was made up. Nobody died there.

After. Do not drive out to look. The emergency services need the roads, and under the mud you cannot see where the road has given way. The water in the streets after a flood is mixed with sewage: boots, gloves, wash your hands. Drink tap water when the town hall says it is safe. Report the damage to the Consorcio within a week. Help through the town hall and the official volunteer points rather than on your own.

Frequently asked questions

Are DANA and gota fría the same thing?

Yes. Gota fría is the old popular name, DANA is the meteorologists' term, which the Spanish weather service has used since the mid-1980s. Forecasts and news now say DANA, and AEMET itself writes it in lower case, dana.

How many DANAs are there in a year?

Fifteen on average over the Iberian Peninsula and the waters around it, according to a century of records from the Complutense University. Most pass as rain with no consequences. The dangerous ones are those that coincide with a warm sea and an easterly wind, most often in September, October and November.

Red warning: do I go to work and take the children to school?

Under a red warning the town halls close the schools, and the Conselleria publishes the list of municipalities the evening before. With DANA Adam there were 42. Sort work out in advance. Once an emergency has been declared you have the right not to go in, and if your route runs along a motorway or through low ground, home is the safer place in any case.

Can I drive under an orange warning?

Around town, yes, if there are no riverbeds or underpasses on the way. Motorways and mountain roads are better put off. Check the DGT map and the AEMET radar before you set off. And never drive into water when you cannot see how deep it is.

An ES-Alert has arrived and I am at work in the centre of Valencia. What do I do?

Read the text. The alert is sent to an area, and it tells you what to do. Usually that means staying where you are, not driving home through low ground and not going down for the car. The centre of Valencia is protected by the new Turia channel. Driving out of it towards l'Horta Sud on an evening like that is more dangerous than waiting it out.

Does insurance cover a flooded flat and car?

Yes, through the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros, as long as there is a policy of some kind on the property. The Consorcio pays, and you can file the claim directly or through your insurer. Try to do it within seven days, the phone number is 900 222 665, and there is no excess for homes and cars.

Where can I find out whether a road is closed?

The DGT map at etraffic.dgt.es and the 112 Comunitat Valenciana account on X. Local CV roads are closed by the Generalitat, and the same 112 account reports it.

Is it worth renting or buying a ground-floor flat?

It depends on where it is. Look the address up on the PATRICOVA map. If the building is in a flood zone, the ground floor and the garage will be the first under water. On higher ground and away from riverbeds a ground floor is as good as any other.