La Sin Ventura

Another tornado in Birmingham, hot on the heels of the recent immolation of Wallace and Grommit, but this week's most disaster-prone EU nation has been Spain - first tropical cyclone Vince made landfall near Seville on Tuesday and then yesterday it was the turn of Catalan town Girona to be flooded out by Biblical downpours.

When the rains come late they come hard. So it was on September 11, 1541 when Guatemala suffered its most notorious mudslide, which brought an end to the two-day reign of the country's second governor, the beautiful 22-year old widow of the Conquistador, Doña Beatriz de la Cueva.

When news reached Santiago of Pedro de Alvarado's death (crushed when his secretary's horse fell on top of him during a punitive expedition in Mexico), Beatriz daubed the palace and cathedral with black paint and shut herself up for days. The rain started to come down incessantly and a bad case of bowel trouble in the Volcan de Fuego set off a series of powerful tremors. Beatriz emerged from mourning on September 9 in order to engineer her election as the colony's new ruler, presciently assuming the title of La Sin Ventura, the hapless one.

Two days later she was dead, drowned when mud dislodged from the slopes of the Agua Volcano deluged the fledgeling capital. Legend has it that Beatriz fled to the Palace's high chapel with 8 of her ladies in waiting and Anica, one of Alvarado's natural children. Her lifeless body was found still clutching the altar crucifix, the child's nearby. Leonor Alvarado Xicotencatl , the Conquistador's seventeen-year old daughter and heir had survived by clinging to the branches of a tree.

The disaster resulted in the removal of Santiago (Antigua) to its present site further away from the skirts of the volcano on which the course of the mudslide can still be made out.

In my readings about Vesuvius I have come across the phenomenon of Bradyism, whereby ground levels can move up and down by 10m or more in a very short period of time in areas subject to a lot of seismic activity. During their childhood a couple of V's brothers once came across the intact remains of a sixteenth century church buried beneath a coffee plantation on the finca. Given the location of this find it would make sense that it was associated with Alvarado's original settlement, but it is said that la Nena does her best to prevent news of this site spreading in order to avoid academics and other undesirables encroaching on her enormous estate.