When 34-year-old Juan Antonio was bouncing down an almost sheer cliff in his lorry towards the sea 70 metres below, he probably wasn’t feeling very positive.

Yet, this driver, who had left the N-340 on a nasty bend on the N-340 near Mamola, escaped with only slight injuries. Another lorry driver wasn’t so lucky; this 52-year-old man died in a fire in his cab after a brutal accident near Puebla de Don Fadrique in the north west of the province.

The two dramatic accidents involving lorries, which occurred only three days apart, couldn’t have turned out any more differently.

The first accident, which occurred on the 10th, appears to have been caused by the driver falling asleep at the wheel, and resulted in the vehicle falling down a 5-metre embankment. The lorry burst into flames and the unfortunate driver was trapped in his cab.

Other drivers soon alerted the emergency services to a crashed lorry in flames. The firemen from Huéscar and Baza didn’t manage to get the carbonized body out of the wreckage until some hours later.

The driver had set off from Algeciras and was en route for Gerona, not far from the French border.

And then, on the 13th, Juan Antonio from Los Guajares plunges down 70 metres of cliff to the sea below… and survives with only slight injuries. You might think that he saved his life by jumping from the cab, but he didn’t – he stayed for the ride.

The cause of this accident isn’t known but the fact is that there were very strong winds on the coast that day and the lorry was unloaded, which may have been a contributing factor.

Juan was fortunate because firstly the lorry didn’t burst into flames and secondly because a worker from a nearby plastic greenhouse had seen what had happened and manage to get him out of the mangled cab.

The Motril firemen arrived and were able to tie him to a stretcher but they had to wait for the Guardia Civil Mountain Rescue team to get him back up the cliff to the road.

However, it didn’t end there because a medical-evacuation helicopter had arrived to whisk him off but the pilot had one hell of a job trying to land with the gusts of winds. But Juan was in luck again because the pilot finally managed to get the runners on the ground long enough to get the injured man in.

When he reached Santa Ana Hospital, it was with a fractured tibia, a couple of bent ribs and a few scratches.

(News: Mamola, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)