Perched high up on a sturdy shelf in her large garden shed, Mari Fraille believed she was about to drown. The flood water was seeping at her toes.

A torrent had blasted through the front door and swept through her house, so she hurried to the shed and, using a stepladder, scrambled on to the shelf next to an old suitcase.

For 20 long minutes, she screamed for help but no one came. ‘It was the worst part of my life,’ the 67-year-old told me this week. ‘I was alone, everyone else along my row of houses had already fled from the flood.’

But those neighbours who had escaped stopped in a nearby field and conducted a head count. And when they realised Mari was missing, sent two young men to find her.

They climbed over her roof, dived into the water and somehow lifted her off the shelf to safety. ‘I was fished out by them and my life didn’t end,’ she said in tears.

‘My home where I have lived for 24 years has been destroyed by the storm.’

The floods have devastated Spain and are still doing so. Yesterday, the Catalan town of Cadaques, five hours’ drive from Mari’s home in Cheste, was submerged and 32 cars washed away.

Earlier this week, parts of Barcelona airport were under water and flights halted.

But it is in eastern Spain that the worst damage has been inflicted. And specifically here in the town of Cheste, an isolated place in the Valencia region which suffered a phenomenal weather catastrophe 13 days ago.

A torrential storm hit the area without warning. More rain fell over eight hours than in the whole of the previous 20 months.

The stream that normally flows gently through the town along the Poyo ravine was transformed into a raging cascade.

At least 100,000 cars were damaged in the region, overturned and carried off by walls of water. Known deaths already stand at more than 200, but many people are still missing.

Some were trapped inside their cars. Others tried to clamber on to the roof of their vehicle to escape drowning in the rising water and died in the attempt.

One man was seen climbing out of his car window and tying himself with his trouser belt to a tree. It is not known if he survived.

Six elderly residents of a care home died when they were trapped inside their ground floor rooms as the water entered. Two little boys were torn from their father’s arms and swept out of the family’s sitting room as the flood waters poured in through the front window. They are still missing.

Today Cheste, with a population of 8,000, is all but destroyed.

Outside homes there are 12-foot high piles of water-logged belongings – rotting clothes, backpacks, trainers, oven shelves, photo albums, armchairs, saucepans, cot mattresses, and the twisted carcasses of bicycles.

The flotsam and jetsam of people’s lives.

‘It looks like rubbish on a landfill dump, but they are all our family’s precious memories,’ said Mari as she surveyed the scene this week.

‘Look, there’s the guitar my son played as a teenager.’ She points at the warped instrument with its strings broken, poking up from a sodden armchair.

No one from the Spanish rescue services was in evidence when we became the first journalists to enter Cheste this week after it was opened up again by police.

A 30-year-old concrete road bridge over the Poyo ravine, linking the town to the outside world, had been snapped in two by the storm water hitting it. Only small dirt roads now allow access to the town.

The communal brick swimming pool had disintegrated in the fearsome rain, leaving a gaping hole in the ground. The park’s green grass and football pitch was buried under layers of glutinous mud.

‘There has been no one come to help us from the authorities,’ said Mari, standing with her son David, a 41-year-old builder, at the still-wet porch of her house. ‘We feel as if we have been abandoned.’

Weather researchers have said the main cause of the intense rainfall was a ‘gota fria’, a ‘natural’ weather event that hits this part of Spain in autumn and winter as cold air descends on warmer waters over the Mediterranean.

Scientists told the BBC that rising global temperatures led to the clouds carrying more rain and that temperatures will keep going up unless governments reach net zero emission targets set by the EU.

‘No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change,’ said Dr Friederike Otto from Imperial College London, who leads an international group of experts on this contentious subject.

Dr Jess Neumann, Reading University’s associate professor of hydrology, added with the same conviction: ‘The flash floods in Spain are another terrible reminder of the more chaotic weather we are experiencing as a result of climate change.

‘Spanish locals have reported walls of water reaching up to nine feet high. The loss of life shows we are not prepared to deal with storms like these.’

Yet many here in this devastated landscape believe there could have been another cause. Because, crucially, the region faced a similar, but less ferocious, flood in 1957, during which 81 people died – long before global warming became the go-to explanation for bad or unpredictable weather.

After that disaster, and to prevent a repeat, the Spanish government built a string of river diversions above Valencia to redirect water away from residential areas.

For more than six decades the system has appeared to work well.

However, plans for a giant dam to ‘prevent flooding’ in this area and ‘regulate flows of water’ during heavy rain in the Poyo ravine were scrapped.

A dam had been approved in 2001 as part of Spain’s National Hydrological Plan but abandoned, apparently, because there was not enough money to build it.

The question now is whether it could have saved lives in this flood? We may never know.

In The Spectator magazine this week, under the headline ‘Dam shame: what really caused Valencia’s floods’, the distinguished science writer Matt Ridley suggested that ‘the failure to build a new dam may well be partly to blame’.

But English financier, conservationist and passionate ‘rewilder’, Ben Goldsmith, also entered the debate on the rights and wrongs of the Cheste dam that never was. In a post on X, he pronounced: ‘Dams are nearly always a huge mistake. It is a myth they help alleviate flooding or drought. In fact, covering over a river basin with concrete has the opposite effect.’

There is no doubt the sentiment about dams has changed over recent years.

The European Commission’s Nature Restoration Law requires member states to remove man-made barriers with the aim of encouraging wildlife and letting 15,000 miles of rivers flow freely by the year 2030.

The Spanish government has been dismantling dams at a furious rate, in line with the EU’s wishes. In 2021 it got rid of 108 dams and weirs. In 2022, another 133 were demolished. According to Dam Removal Europe, a coalition of seven green pressure groups, Spain has been a leading exponent of dam removal. Last year it was second only to France, and the year before that it topped the EU league for dismantling them.

Yet many insist dams are essential to protect lives. Indeed, people in the Spanish city of Aragon believe they were saved from a flood last month by a mighty Roman structure built in the first century AD on the orders of Emperor Augustus.

To investigate the matter of the Cheste dam further, we visited the site where it was due to be built, up above the town next to the Poyo ravine in pretty countryside dotted with trees and rabbit warrens. There we came across retired local, Ramon Milla, 57, who has a smallholding where he has lived all his life. He told us emphatically the dam ‘would have helped stop the recent floods killing people’.

He added: ‘My late mother Rosa warned us children that we were growing up in a flood zone. Her mother will have told her the same thing. We always knew it.’

He remembers learning about the 1957 flood.

‘It was part of our family folklore. It was a bad event back then, but this time it is far worse’.

Mr Milla pointed down to where the dam was planned in the valley below his house. ‘The politicians cancelled it because they don’t care for the people. Everyone here is angry that there was no dam.’

Right beside the proposed dam site a tangled wreck of cars was spread over a field – some of the vehicles rescued after being swept along the Poyo ravine on the night of the floods.

‘I saw a lot still had their lights on as they raced past us in the water at an amazing speed,’ he said. ‘The noise of the roaring river was terrible. There were trees, reeds, cars all tangled up together.’

Mr Milla is not a climate change sceptic and says the weather in the area has got hotter over the years. ‘If global warming is causing the problem, surely that is more of a reason to build a dam – or dams – to control Mother Nature and save lives?’

Back in Cheste, Mari’s son David is handing out face masks to neighbours trying to clear up.

As he does so, children make mud pies with bare hands in the sodden ground.

‘We are worried about cholera coming soon,’ he said, showing me his leather biker jacket, already covered in green mould spores, from his mother’s house.

The lavatories in the wrecked houses spewed out sewage as the floods entered them. ‘There are going to be some diseases here,’ he added.

Further along the road is the home of Juan Roca, a sound technician, and his wife Marta, who works in a local orange packing factory. The couple, both 39, have two girls aged five and seven and, until now, were happy living here.

They know that, during the 1957 flood at Cheste, water came up to the top of the steps leading to the house and its front patio. It never got further.

This time it rushed over the patio and on through Juan and Marta’s front door.

‘It reached five foot seven inches in our living room and you can see the water mark it left,’ points out Juan, looking worried as he shakes his head. ‘We don’t feel safe here any more.’

This family are planning to move but wonder how they will sell the property in what is now a disaster zone.

‘Who would want to buy anything in Cheste?’ says Juan forlornly. ‘The floods may come again and we don’t know when.’