The flood, as the ledger saw it: Valencia’s reconstruction month by month
On 29 October 2024 the DANA floods devastated Valencia’s suburbs. In the tender record, reconstruction begins within days — and twenty-two months later, it still hasn’t returned to normal.
Disasters have two timelines. The one on television lasts a news cycle. The one in the procurement record starts days later and runs for years — because everything rebuilt in public space must first be tendered, awarded, and paid.
We tracked construction and cleanup tenders (CPV 45 and 90) from public buyers in Valencia city and the worst-hit municipalities — Paiporta, Catarroja, Torrent, Alfafar — month by month through the disaster.
The surge is unambiguous: from ~49 tenders a month to 117 by January — 2.4× the baseline— beginning within days of the water receding (October itself looks normal only because the flood arrived on the 29th). And the long tail is the real story: twenty-two months on, the affected buyers still publish at ~1.5× their pre-flood rhythm. Reconstruction is not an event. It is a multi-year procurement programme, publicly itemised.
There is also a civic reading. Every euro of that reconstruction is in these notices: which works were prioritised, which firms won them, at what price, how fast. Anyone auditing the recovery — journalists, opposition councillors, the residents of Paiporta — can do it from the public record. That is what the record is for.
Data & method
Source: PLACSP notices from buyers whose published city matches Valencia, Paiporta, Catarroja, Torrent or Alfafar, lead CPV 45/90, Jan 2024–Sep 2025. City matching is conservative (regional bodies headquartered elsewhere are excluded), so absolute counts understate the surge. Below-threshold menores lack CPV codes in our current pipeline and are excluded — another reason these figures are floors, not ceilings.