Valencia’s leader apologizes for ‘mistakes’ in handling deadly floods — but won’t resign

The head of Spain’s eastern Valencia region, Carlos Mazón, admitted Friday to “mistakes” in the management of last month’s massive floods, which killed 216 people in that part of the country.

“I’m not going to deny mistakes,” Mazón said in an address to the regional parliament, adding that he was “not going to evade any responsibility.”

On the day of the disaster in late October, despite clear warnings, Mazón kept his schedule, posing for pictures even as disaster began to strike his region.

As the head of the regional government, “I want to apologize,” to the people who had “the feeling that the aid did not arrive or was not enough,” he added on Friday.

As Mazón was speaking, around 300 protestors gathered outside Valencia’s parliament chanting slogans demanding his resignation, Spanish newspaper El País reported. Around 130,000 people took to the streets of Valencia on Saturday calling for his removal.

Despite mounting pressure, Mazón has refused to step down. Instead, he had blamed Spain’s AEMET weather agency and the Júcar River Basin Authority for not giving “sufficient information and in time.”

“We did the best we could in the situation we were in, with the information available and with the resources we had, which was clearly not enough,” he told the parliament on Friday.

He also announced the creation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry to determine what had gone wrong.

“Valencians have the right to know everything that happened, the information that was handled and the decisions that were taken during the course of an emergency for which today and now we must seek an explanation,” he said.

Spain faced its deadliest floods in decades in late October, and the Valencia region was particularly affected. The disaster claimed 224 lives nationwide, severely damaged infrastructure, destroyed buildings and submerged farmlands, with estimated losses reaching tens of billions of euros.

Meanwhile, torrential rains in Malaga this week caused more major disruption, displacing thousands of residents from their homes amid widespread evacuations.