The disaster in the rooms of the Atalayas leisure area is the worst disaster in discotheques of the last thirty years in Spain, a painful distinction. The first hypotheses indicate that the origin of the fire could be a short circuit, as happened to the one that until yesterday led this tragic balance, that of Alcalá 20 in Madrid. Thus, the front page of La Vanguardia on December 19, 1983 showed the sorrowful faces of the relatives of the victims of the fire that happened two nights earlier in the Alcalá 20 nightclub in Madrid. Inside, on the inside pages, the chronicle it explained how most of the victims died “in just three minutes”. Inhalation of carbon monoxide and crushing were the main causes of death for the 81 people who lost their lives in a room that, according to the survivors, had kept the bars closed during the event.
Forty years later, the disaster of the night from Saturday to Sunday in Murcia stands as the deadliest in three decades in Spain. In the most recent memory there is the tragedy of the Madrid Arena, which was not owned by a nightclub, but a municipal venue, but it did act as such on the fateful morning. On November 1, 2012, five young people at a Halloween party died in a human avalanche when they tried to leave the venue, which doubled the allowed capacity.
Earlier, on January 14, 1990, history also forces us to look towards Zaragoza, where the Flying nightclub burned down and 43 people died. The space became “a gas chamber” for the young people who occupied it, as chroniclers of the time reported, as they inhaled carbon monoxide produced by the incomplete combustion of certain materials in the room. Firefighters identified that the fire started in spaces that were used as a warehouse and where the light meters and the air conditioning system were located. “From there the fire spread through the false ceilings and the electrical ducts towards the basement”, explained the head of the Zaragoza City Council’s Fire Service at the time. They died of suffocation.
Ubrique, a town in Cádiz where six people lost their lives and ten others were injured after a party hall burned down in 1979, also figures in the history of nightclub disasters. The event is far from the previous ones because the nightclub was already closed when the fire started, but it caused the roof of the premises to explode and affected the homes that were located above and the people who lived there.
Also in 1979 and only a month later there was a fire at the Charada nightclub in Madrid: four dead and eleven injured. That winter night, around eleven o’clock at night, an explosion was heard from outside. Inside, flames began to burn through the carpeted ceiling and quickly spread throughout the room.
Since 1978 there have been 144 deaths in similar disasters. Among these, the four people who died in a fire caused in the Scala party hall in Barcelona in 1978 or the four people who lost their lives in the fire at the Miami Club, also in Barcelona. Here too it was a short circuit.
