How five small mountain villages withstood the giant blackout in Spain

Thanks to a system put in place by the mayor, the rural town of Oseja de Sajambre, in northern Spain, was able to recover power within minutes during the major blackout that deprived the Iberian Peninsula of electricity on April 28. This was explained in the major Madrid daily, “El País.”

Their secret: they're used to power outages. DRAWING BY KOPELNITSKY, USA.

At 12:33 on Monday [April 28], the five small villages of the Sajambre Valley were without electricity, along with the rest of Spain and Portugal. At 12:50, unlike the rest of Spain and Portugal, the 150 inhabitants of this valley, grouped within a single municipality, began to have electricity again. At 1:30 p.m., residents of Calle del Doctor Esquerdo in Madrid were queuing at Chinese bazaars to buy battery-powered radios. They were struggling across the road with the traffic lights off.

In the crowds that had formed at the entrances to the buildings, some smart alecks blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for all the chaos. At the same time, most of the inhabitants of this valley in the León region, not far from Asturias, nestled in one of the wildest and most beautiful areas of the Picos de Europa, let the morning slip by as if nothing were happening. In fact, nothing was happening.

Accustomed to these occasional twenty-minute power outages, which are very common in this area, many of the residents were not even aware of the general outage that had hit the country beyond their mountains. The baker, Merc

Antonio Jimenez Barca

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