The rain in Spain falls mainly ....

Tuesday 7^th November

It rained continuously overnight, from early evening right through to morning. We drove to the house and arrived about 10.30am to find it flooded right to the front door, with no-one working there of course. Reviewed the previous days work and noted the glass blocks were in place to form a sort of window providing a bit of light to the upstairs bathroom.

We decided to bail out the house, despite the continuing heavy rain, and tried to stem the flow with builders buckets, but were fighting a loosing battle, as all the rain falling on the 25 sq metres of the terrace was draining down to the kitchen via the 1^st floor roof and into the house. J came up with more buckets and bowls so that most of the terrace run-off could be caught and emptied next door. We were then able to get on top of the house flood and scoop/mop it up. After 2 hours or so, we had won and the house was clear and it had stopped raining.

By this time we were totally drenched to the skin and cold, so decided to go to our favourite bar for hot drinks and tapas lunch of bacalao and patata enscillada. During lunch, the heavens opened with 30 minutes of torrential rain, creating a waterfall and torrent outside the bar making it impossible to leave. We knew our makeshift buckets and bowls could not cope with this deluge, and sure enough , when it had more or less stopped and we arrived back to the house, we were back to square 1……the house had re-flooded. (later we read in newspaper headlines that our area had 157 litres per square metre……ie nearly 4000 litres of water on the terrace to be bailed out!!)

However, the task of clearing up was easier this time as it had stopped raining, and J went out to buy a new mop and bucket …..pleading mucho necesscito with the store as it was closed as also flooded . After emptying the containers on the first floor and clearing the lying water on the roof, we were able to clear up downstairs in about an hour.

Before returning to the mountains, we went to see if the river-bed road had flooded, and sure enough, the road was closed as it had become a fast flowing ford at the intersection with the river bed road that we had driven along the previous week…..see pic.