An after dinner can be endless. Any average Spaniard could think this and even understand it. But that alibi provided for 13 months by the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, and the journalist Maribel Vilaplana to justify what they did on the afternoon of October 29, 2024, has just blown. Mazón and Vilaplana were not together from lunchtime until 6.30 or 6.45 pm, the time when the restaurant closed, as they both stated in their latest statements in court and in the Congressional commission. They had been there much longer, according to his latest parking receipt, which indicates he left the garage at 7:47 p.m. And perhaps the two were there even longer, and there a new path opened up that would shatter everything that had come before. According to the newspaper Levantciting People’s Party sources, Vilaplana picked up Mazón in the car around 8 p.m. near the Palau de la Generalitat. This would mean that they were together until a few minutes before the alarm sounded at 8.11pm, which did not save anyone. A meeting that lasted five hours took place in the worst moments of a catastrophe that cost the lives of 229 people.
22 days after his resignation, without saying any words resignation, and ten days after his appearance at the Congress of Deputies, Carlos Mazón insisted that he had gone to the Palau de la Generalitat “on foot” and assured that he had not taken Vilaplana in his car to the seat of the Valencian Government. “I deny once again that I am untraceable, I deny once again that it was not known where I was. I deny once again that I went to my house, I deny once again that they showed me some screenshots” of the food flooding, he assured upon his arrival at the gates of Palau this Wednesday, a few minutes before what is presumed to be his last plenary session of the Consell. And he tried to downplay the importance of the new information: “A question that seems more save me more than anything,” he criticized.
Mazón insisted that his journey after the meal consisted of walking “from the door” of the car park to the Palau de la Generalitat, “among other things” because “it wouldn’t make much sense” to go by car in “a perimeter zone where access is limited to authorized vehicles only and the closest you can get is precisely Calle de la Paz, where the car park is located”. Mazón and Vilaplana said goodbye, however, at the entrance to the Plaza de Tetuán car park, as the communicator testified before Judge Dana, and not at the exit of Calle de la Paz, as Mazón repeats. And he does so because he has always reiterated, even in the Dana congressional commission, where he is obliged to tell the truth, that from Bonaire Street, where the restaurant is located, he went to Peace Street and from there to Plaza de la Reina, without ever including the two or three streets that he must have crossed to greet Vilaplana where she herself testified.
For more than a year, one question was shouted in the demonstrations taking place in the streets of Valencia: “Where was Mazón in the worst hours of the catastrophe?” In recent months and after several twists in each other’s scripts, the hours he dedicated to the time spent with the then president during a business lunch (which was not on the president’s official agenda), they pointed out that, after leaving the El Ventorro restaurant in the late afternoon, they went to the car park where she had parked her car, stayed a while longer talking and said goodbye right there. And, although in the court Catarroja in charge of the management of the dana never mentioned what time he separated from him, nor did he clarify what time he left, everything seemed to indicate, from what he remembered, that it was just after 6.45 pm. But the parking receipt showed that this was not the case: they were there at least another 45 minutes.
Vilaplana told a story in court about what happened that afternoon that was very different from the one he told this newspaper a month after the tragedy. Then, through a spokesperson authorized by her, she explained that she had left the meal around 5.45pm. And, after being questioned by the same source as this newspaper, he states that he “doesn’t remember the exact times”. At 5.45pm it is still daytime in Valencia on October 29th and it is not nearly eight in the afternoon.
In a letter signed by the journalist, shortly before being called to testify in court as a witness, she corrected that time and added another 60 minutes after dinner. Version he repeated in court on November 3. The restaurant owner then also confirmed the departure time from El Ventorro: before 7pm. The time of mystery as to where the man had been was therefore limited. president. What neither of them clarified, neither in court nor in a congressional commission, is what time they said goodbye or what time they left the place of events, understood as the triangle between El Ventorro, the car park and the Palau de la Generalitat.
That left an hour in limbo: 7 p.m. — it might be a little longer, between the 10 or 15 minutes he remembers spending where he said goodbye and got to the car — until 8 p.m. when Mazón was seen arriving at the Palau de la Generalitat. One hour for a route of 800 meters which, according to what was declared by the institution president in the congressional Dana commission, he did it on foot. With the phone in the backpack. And this is why he did not answer the call from the head of Emergencies, Salomé Pradas, at 7.10pm, at the critical moment of the catastrophe. When the Emergency Center (Cecopi) had already decided that it was necessary to send the alarm, according to the declarations of the president of the Provincial Council, Vicente Mompó, who even exclaimed: “Send him away”.
Both, Vilaplana and Mazón, he being ultimately responsible for the management of the dana in their Community and not her, kept the key information hidden for 13 months until they said goodbye to the food that was not stopped even though he knew then what was happening in the southern municipalities of New Turia. Well, the receipt from the car park where Vilaplana had parked the car reveals that he left there at least at 7.47pm. So if you take into account his testimony in court that it was 10 or 15 minutes after he said goodbye and left, they had to say goodbye around 7:30 p.m.
Another of the summits of the affair is occupied by the journalist of the Valencian public television À Punt Xavier Carrau, Vilaplana’s former partner and father of her two children. This Wednesday Carrau sent a message on his The video shows the dramatic situation of the Poyo ravine and how the deadly tongue of water, mud and reeds demolishes a walkway. Vilaplana responded, while in the company of Mazón. It would still have taken almost an hour and a half to reach the emergency room, where Cecopi had been summoned, and another 40 minutes for the journalist to leave the car park. On Tuesday, after the payment deadline expired, Carrau wrote: “As I said a few minutes ago, an abyss with unpredictable consequences is opening up.”
Him presidentafter 37 minutes of being disconnected in which he didn’t answer or make any calls, he finally picked up the phone at 7.34pm. It was his regional secretary for Infrastructure, Javier Sendra, who warned him that the metro command center had collapsed. The Poyo ravine had overflowed. He had been incommunicable, at least through calls, since 6:57 p.m. until that moment. Mazón arrived just before 8 p.m. at the Palau de la Generalitat and at 8.28pm he entered the emergency room facilities. The alert was sent at 8:11 p.m. At the time, at least 156 people had died from drowning and mud damage and 37 were in a critical situation.
This Wednesday Mazón repeated that he is not aware of a minute that continues to hide what he has done since 6.57pm. at 7.34pm, when he did not answer phone calls, while people were drowning less than five kilometers from the center of Valencia, where he had just finished a meeting lasting at least four hours with an epilogue-farewell of another hour.
