Eighteen passengers, most of whom were university students, managed to escape from a bus that had caught fire not far from Órgiva. The incident managed to freeze the traffic on the main Alpujarra road that runs between Órgiva and Trevélez.

The Alsa bus, which had set out for Granada on Saturday the 10th, was on the Alpujarra run, via Órgiva to the upper villages, when, just outside Cañar, the budding disaster was discovered.

Luckily, a car driver had been trailing the bus for the previous few kilometres, because he had arranged to collect a female friend from the bus when it reached her destination. He saw that the back of the bus was on fire and immediately rang her mobile. She rapidly informed the driver, who pulled up and evacuated the vehicle before trying, in vain, to extinguish the fire.

Before long, firemen from Cádiar, Protección Civil from Órgiva and a helicopter from the forest fire-fighting base at Tablones, had joined efforts to fight the fire.

Obviously, as said at the beginning of the article, the stricken vehicle had blocked the road and consequently the Guardia Civil had to try to put some order to the chaos. On the bright side, more than one of the students was able to report that all their course work, sadly, had been destroyed in the fire; otherwise it would have been handed in on time…