COMMUNAL anger has erupted online after a Spanish public broadcaster was accused of putting spectacle before safety during Storm Leonardo.
A new clip shows an RTVE reporter for the program Malas Lenguas standing ankle-deep in fast-moving floodwater during a live broadcast from the Cadiz province, as torrential rain battered parts of Andalucia.
The report came in the midst of 24 hours of torrential rainfall that dumped an incredible 600mm of rain on the town Grazalema.
The clip, shared widely over Wednesday evening, prompted a wave of criticism aimed at the state-owned channel and the wider media industry.
Commenters accused RTVE of pushing journalists into unnecessary danger to secure dramatic footage.
READ MORE: Search intensifies in Malaga for woman who ‘jumped into a river to rescue her dog and was swept away by flash floods’ caused by Storm Leonardo
One user lamented the ‘degrading’ of public service broadcasting, arguing that sending a reporter into raging floodwaters was ‘not informing, it’s sensationalism.’
Another said producers were damaging the credibility of RTVE’s news teams and embarrassing those who take public information seriously.
However, not everyone agreed. Some viewers defended the report, suggesting the team on the ground knew the risks and had been covering the storm for hours.
READ MORE: WATCH: Storm Leonardo latest: Walls ‘bleeding water’ and rain pouring through electrical sockets as military deployed to Grazalema during record-breaking rainfall
‘They do their live broadcasts freely,’ one user wrote. ‘It surprised me too, but I thought they knew what they were doing.’
The debate has reignited long-running questions about media ethics, safety and whether rolling news has crossed the line between reporting extreme weather and exploiting it.
READ MORE: Andalucian mountain town soaks in an astonishing 500mm of rain in just 24 hours – obliterating 78-year record
Another video shows the sheer amount of water filling the streets of Grazalema.
It comes as the town, Spain’s wettest town, shattered its all-time rainfall record after Storm Leonardo dropped a deluge of biblical proportions.
Grazalema, the picturesque pueblo blanco in the Cadiz mountains, had recorded a staggering 512.5mm of rain in a single 24-hour period ending at 8pm on Wednesday.
Provisional records show that it has now exceeded 600mm of rainfall.
The figure is so extreme that it has annihilated the town’s previous daily rainfall record – which had stood for nearly eight decades.
According to data from the local weather station, the previous high was 348.9mm, set way back on January 27, 1948.
Storm Leonardo didn’t just beat this 78-year-old record; it smashed it by nearly 50%, dumping an extra 163mm of water on the village in one day.
To put the scale of the downpour into context, the 512.5mm that fell today is significantly more than the city of Madrid receives in an entire year (approximately 400mm).
The intensity of the storm did not let up once it began late on Tuesday.
Data shows that 314.8mm fell in just a 12-hour window – but even more astonishingly the total rainfall over the last 10 days now sits at nearly 1,300mm.
That 10-day figure alone is higher than the annual rainfall of A Coruña in rainy Galicia, notorious for having an England-like climate.
Meteorologists at AEMET explain that Grazalema’s unique geography is responsible for these eye-watering figures.
The town sits in a natural ‘funnel’ that forces warm, humid winds from the Atlantic rapidly upwards.
As the air rises over the Sierra de Grazalema, it cools and creates turbulence, forcing water droplets to collide and merge in a process known as ‘coalescence’.
This mechanism allows clouds to dump their load with frightening efficiency, creating the ‘rain bomb’ effect seen today.
The unprecedented volume of water has left the ground completely saturated.
Mayor Carlos Garcia reported that the earth is so waterlogged that ‘streams have appeared where none existed before’.
Some residents even filmed water flowing out of electrical sockets inside their homes as the groundwater level rose into the walls.
Other locals have pointed out that historic houses were often built with internal drainage channels to handle such deluges.
Modern builds, however, lack these defences, leaving them helpless as the water rises from beneath.
Yet despite the incredible deluge, Grazalema does not claim Spain’s all-time national record for 24-hour rainfall.
That was recorded in Oliva (Valencia) on November 3, 1987, when 817mm fell in 24 hours. There was also a more recent recording of 771.8mm in Turís (Valencia) in October 2024.
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