40 years have passed. Four decades in which Madrid has not stopped writing new pages of its history. Many successful and some tragic. Like that of December 17, 1983 that still shocks those who listen to it: The fire of Alcalá 20 where the virulence of the flames took the lives of 81 people, most of them young, who were celebrating the arrival of Christmas.
The night broke at the edge of 4:45 a.m. A short circuit in the electrical wiring ignited the stage curtains and tapestries. And everything that could go wrong was chained together as if it were a macabre script.
The decoration of the premises, loaded at that time with hundreds of kilos of highly flammable festive material, helped the flames spread at high speed. The only hose in the premises did not measure enough nor did it have enough pressure to stop the source of the fire. The fire extinguishers did not work as they should. The emergency exits were locked… The half thousand people who were dancing in one of the capital’s fashionable venues barely had time to escape the death trap that had become the second basement of number 20 of the Alcalá street.
That’s what happened downstairs. But the situation in the boxes was also dramatic. The effluvium of toxic gases was of such intensity that the smoke quickly appeared through the door located at the entrance of the Alcázar theater, suffocating along the way those who had managed, crawling in an already dark room, to head up the narrow and steep stairs of the premises. .
“A deadly mousetrap,” agreed the emergency services that acted that night and which only a handful of the club’s employees were able to avoid thanks to their knowledge of the convoluted access to an emergency door that led to the rear Arlabán Street. .
“You couldn’t see an inch and many made a mistake and went into the cloakroom, for example, where they were piled up one on top of the other. When I passed by there I thought I was stepping on coats, but I immediately saw that they were dead people, about thirty,” he noted. Years later, Jose María Pérez Soria, who was then chief of guard of the Madrid City Council.
The firefighters had so many problems accessing the room that they did not hesitate to try to open any other way. They even pierced the skylights overlooking Alcalá Street, offering an unexpected escape route through which a dozen people who had desperately clung to the air conditioning tubes managed to escape.
There was still room for another miracle. Three more people managed to save their lives thanks to Francisco José Tortosa. A young man from Melilla who had just arrived in Madrid to start his career as a photographer and who did not hesitate to run towards the flames to rescue the victims. He did it three times. But in his room he tried to faint from the toxicity of the gases, and he ended up losing his life.
Ten years later, the Provincial Court of Madrid sentenced the four co-owners of the premises to two years in prison for a crime of reckless imprudence resulting in death. The same penalty fell on Ricardo Herranz, former member of the Entertainment Board of the Ministry of the Interior, and Miguel Gabaldón, a technical installer authorized by the Ministry of Industry.
The court acquitted the councilor of the Security Area, Emilio García Horcajo, considering his lack of knowledge in this regard, since a few weeks before the incident the powers had been handed over to him.
The Alcalá 20 nightclub reopened in January 2010, after several failed attempts, under the name Adraba. The company that reopened it may be familiar to the reader. This is FSM Group whose owner is Miguel Ángel Flores, the organizer of the Halloween party at the Madrid Arena in which an avalanche occurred in which five young people died on November 1, 2012.
Since then it has changed its name several times, but although there is no sign from the time, there are many passers-by whose hearts ache every time they pass by and remember that terrifying Christmas night in 1983.
