Five people dead and four injured after explosion at Spanish coalmine
Cause of incident in Degaña, Asturias, remains unclear, as emergency services cite ‘problem with a machine’
Agence France-Presse in Madrid, Mon 31 Mar 2025 09.25 EDT
Five people died and another four were seriously injured after an explosion on Monday at a coalmine in Spain’s northern region of Asturias, officials have said.
Two other workers at the Cerredo mine in Degaña, about 450km (280 miles) north-west of Madrid, were unharmed in the incident, local emergency services said.
Officials had earlier said two people were missing but they now believe everyone has been accounted for.
While the cause of the explosion has not been confirmed, emergency services said they had been alerted to an “incident” involving “a problem with a machine”.
Local media said the machine had exploded.
The injured were taken to hospitals in nearby cities, two of them by helicopter. They had suffered burns and, in one case, a head injury.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, sent his “sincere condolences” to the families of the victims and wished a “speedy recovery” to the injured, in a message posted on X.
The head of the regional government of Asturias, Adrián Barbón, declared there would be two days of mourning “as a sign of respect for the deceased”.
Mining has for centuries been a major industry in Asturias, a densely forested mountainous region.
In 1995, 14 people died after an explosion at a mine in Asturias near the town of Mieres
