An officer of the Civil Guardia recalled the emotional rescue of Almudena, the only person to leave the chariot alive eight after the accident in Urda. The operatives held the young lady's hand for over an hour until they were able to free her from the wreckage of the convoy.
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31/10/2026
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Um Officer of the Civil Guardia recalled the rescue of Almudena, the “one person who managed to get out alive” of carriage eight of Renfe’s high-speed train, which collided with another train, on Wednesday morning, in the locality of Urda, Spanish province of Toledo.
“I was frustrated until I knew she was alive. Because, in the end, he was the only person who managed to get out alive”, he started by counting the agent, identified as Salvador, in a video shared by the Spanish authority.
The rescued victim was Almudena, a young woman from Seville, who was trapped under the carriage of Renfe's train after the rear collision.
“ We heard a girl screaming in there. We lay on the ground and had to make a run for it. We couldn't see her. After a while, when it seemed that we were not going to find her, her hand appeared”, recalled Salvador, visibly moved.
“ As soon as we found her hand, we started talking to her. I was conscious. We learned that his name was Almudena, because we asked him, and that he was from Seville, because he had on his right wrist a green bracelet of a religious brotherhood”, he added.
The young woman “had bleeding wounds” on her hands, which the agents managed to stop. Then followed the task of trying to “take away everything that was on top of her and what was incarcerated”.
“ We grabbed her hand and never let her go again. We started working shifts to get everything we could out of her until there came a time when we could better access her body. We could already see his legs”, he said.
“ After over an hour of fighting to get her out of there, we did it. You got out of that carriage alive. He was the only person we could rescue with life from that place,” he added.
Almudena was transported to a hospital for medical treatment and Agent Salvador did not give up until more information about her health. He asked friends he had in the hospital “if a girl named Almudena from Seville had entered”, asking them “just to say if she was alive”.
“It was the only thing we wanted to know after everything we had done on site,” he said. “Later in the afternoon, I was confirmed that there was a girl with those characteristics. I asked for his physical traits and they confirmed that it corresponded to the description”.
Later, Salvador managed to get in touch with Almudena’s boyfriend, who “confident that it was really her”.
“ It was her eyes, it was her bracelet and, above all, she was alive and she was well”, she concluded.
Una mano con la pulsera de una hermandad de Sevilla. Y un nombre, Almudena. El Guardia civil Salvador agarró aquella mano en el coche 8 y lepromio que iba a salir con vida. Y así fue. Behind an hour of complicated work of rescue, pudieron sacarla and evacula al hospital. El testimonio uno de los muchos compañeros de la #GuardiaCivil y servicios de emergencias que tuvieron que intervenir en el accidente railroado de Urda (Toledo).
— Guardia Civil (@guardiacivil) October 31, 2026
The accident occurred on Wednesday morning, when two high-speed trains traveling more than 500 people collided in Urda, a town about 150 kilometres south of Madrid.
According to the most recent report, there are at least 69 victims, a number which, according to the Spanish Committee on the Investigation of Rail Accidents (CIAF), remains provisional.
This was the second train accident with high-speed trains this year in Spain, after that of Adamuz, in Córdoba, in January, in which 46 people died.