Fire at nursing home in northeast Spain leaves 10 dead

Firefighters were sent to the small town, with 840 inhabitants, and controlled the flames at the ‘Jardines de Villafranca’ residence, a single-story building.

Of the 69 residents, 59 were “unharmed”, according to local emergency services.

Paquita Morata, director of the association that manages the establishment, founded in 2008 to house the elderly, but also receives people with mental disorders of any age, said that the first hypotheses point to a poorly extinguished cigarette as the origin of the fire.

The mayor of Villafranca de Ebro, Volga Ramírez Gamiz, told journalists that the fire was concentrated in just one room, but the smoke spread quickly throughout the house and was probably the cause of most of the deaths.

“It was in a room, luckily this room has a security door. But smoke came out,” said Ramírez Gamiz. She said two employees were in the home at the time of the fire.

“There was a fire door that worked, half of the building was safe from the fire”, highlighted the fire commander of the municipality of Zaragoza, Eduardo Sánchez.