On a more tragic note, a mother and her young daughter perished when the woman was taking the child to school. Their car plunged down a steep hillside just outside Pampaneira, plummeting some 400 metres to the bottom.
As fate would have it, the daughter had an important class to attend that day at the high school in Órgiva but had overslept and missed the bus, but she managed to convince her mum to take her by car the 13 kilometres that separate their home from the school.
It had rained that night and the roads were slippery, which is what probably provoked the accident and lead to their deaths at the bottom of a steep valley.
When the Guardia Civil reached the wreckage, both of them were dead and there was nothing to be done. The father and the elder son were immediately informed and were naturally devastated.
How easy it is to write the word ‘devastated’ but until you’ve felt the full impact of those ten letters, it is quite an insipid adjective isn’t it. Sorry for the aside.
The accident occurred a few minutes after nine in the morning. Moments before the 18-year-old Valeria P. S. had sent an SMS to a class companion, asking her to tell the Classical Greek teacher that she would be a few minutes late for the class…
That same day, over on the GR-5202 just outside Ugíjar another person lost his life when two cars collided around 20.30h in the evening. A tragic day for the Alpujarra.