Yosselyn Jara Sandoval was crammed inside a train underneath central Madrid when the lights went out and the train stopped. “We wanted to get off but they didn’t let us,” she says. “Everything was dark and people started to suffocate.”
About an hour and a half later, they were allowed off the train, and groped their way along the walls with the help of flashlights. “It was like a horror movie,” adds Sandoval, who had travelled from the suburbs to buy her father a birthday present. “People were falling.”
Outside, she discovered they were far from alone. At about 12.33pm on Monday, about half of Spain’s electricity generation capacity fell offline, shutting off power across Spain and Portugal.