Spanish train crash kills 39 as survivors recount 'horror' and families search for missing

On Sunday evening near the town of Adamuz in Córdoba, two high-speed trains collided in a sequence of events that would leave at least 39 people dead and hundreds more injured or traumatized. The rear section of an Iryo train traveling from Málaga toward Madrid derailed and struck an oncoming Renfe service bound for Huelva. The impact was violent enough to send two carriages plummeting down a 13-foot embankment, trapping passengers in twisted metal and darkness.

Lucas Merakio, an Argentinian passenger in carriage five of the Madrid-bound train, survived to describe what unfolded in those first moments after impact. He recounted how the train began to lurch violently before carriage eight derailed with a sound and force that made clear something catastrophic had occurred. When the other train passed by, the lights in his carriage died. Screaming erupted around him. The train braked hard and stopped. In the sudden silence that followed, Merakio could hear cries from other parts of the wreckage—voices that sounded, he said, like something from a horror film. Passengers began breaking windows with hammers to escape. When Merakio moved toward carriage six, which had derailed, he found people trapped underneath calling out for water. He and other able-bodied survivors passed bottles down to them, doing what they could until police and ambulances arrived roughly 40 minutes after the collision. By then, victims were emerging with severe fractures and deep lacerations. The medical personnel on scene were overwhelmed. What Merakio did not yet know was that carriage eight of his own train lay overturned with bodies inside.

One small detail from his account carries the weight of chance: a woman who had tried to use the toilet in carriage eight before the crash found it occupied and moved to carriage five instead. That decision to walk to a different carriage saved her life. Carriage eight did not survive the impact.

The scale of the disaster became clearer as emergency services worked through the night. At least 170 people were injured overall. Seventy-five were hospitalized in the immediate aftermath. Regional president Juanma Moreno visited the scene and described what he saw: bodies scattered hundreds of meters from the wreckage, thrown from the train by the force of impact. When he looked at the crushed metal and twisted iron, he said, the violence of what had happened was impossible to miss. Firefighters were working methodically, but Moreno warned that when heavy machinery arrived to lift the carriages, they would likely find more victims.

Among those confirmed dead were Oscar Toro, a journalist, and his wife María Clauss, a photojournalist. The Iberoamerican Cultural Association confirmed their deaths and remembered them as great professionals and people of extraordinary human quality. Friends mourned not just their loss but the absence they would leave behind—a piece of themselves, one tribute read, gone with them.

As the hours passed, hospitals filled with the injured and critical. At least 48 people remained hospitalized, with 15 in critical condition. Four of those in critical condition were children. The uncertainty about who had survived and who had not sent families into desperate searching. On social media, relatives posted photographs and pleas. Ricardo Chamorro Caliz, 57, was unaccounted for; his son posted his father's image asking anyone in Adamuz who recognized him to make contact. A woman named Miriam del Rosario Alberico Larios, 27 years old, last seen in carriage one wearing green corduroy trousers, was missing. A family of four from Huelva—Felix Zamorano, Pepe Zamorano, Cristina Alvarez, and their son—had vanished into the wreckage. Rafael Millan Albert and his wife had been on the train; only the wife's status was known. The posts multiplied through the night and into the morning, each one a small act of resistance against the possibility that a loved one was gone.

One woman named Ana, who had been traveling with her pregnant sister on the Iryo train, broke down describing what she had witnessed. The lights went out. The train stopped. She was pulled from the carriage through a window and found herself separated from her sister, who lay unconscious inside. She screamed to anyone who would listen that her sister was pregnant. When firefighters arrived, they extracted the pregnant woman and rushed her to intensive care. Ana sat in a hospital, not knowing what would happen next, haunted by the screaming of so many people around her—a sound she compared to a horror film. That was the texture of survival: not relief, but separation, uncertainty, and the knowledge that you had lived while others had not.