Valencia DANA floods (2024)
Torrential rains of October 2024 in the Valencia region, compensated by the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros without any prior disaster declaration.
A cut-off low aloft, which Spaniards call a DANA, can stall over a warm coast and pour down the equivalent of a year's rain in a few hours. The dry ravines crossing the suburbs then turn into torrents, and the damage hits homes, shops and tens of thousands of cars at once. In Spain, such extraordinary risks are covered by a public body funded through a surcharge included in every property and motor policy, which pays claims directly, without waiting for an authority to recognize the disaster. The comparison with the French natural catastrophe regime turns on that point: the trigger is the policy itself, not a decree, which speeds up mass compensation.
On October 29, 2024, rainfall of several hundred millimeters within a few hours flooded Valencia's southern suburbs and killed more than two hundred people. As of November 25, 2025, the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros had registered 194,141 claims for the province of Valencia alone, about 117,000 of them for vehicles and 61,000 for homes, and had paid out more than 4 billion euros, the heaviest event in its history.
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