Fifteen Years Later, the Reservoir Gives Back Its Secret — and It’s More Terrifying Than Anyone Imagined
For fifteen long years, the people of Galicia whispered the same name whenever fog settled over the valley:
Ana, Lucas, and David.
They were cousins. Teenagers. Vanished on a sunny afternoon in 2010.
The police said it was a tragic accident — that the A Fervenza reservoir, swollen after heavy rains, had swallowed them whole. Their families mourned. The region wept. And slowly, painfully, Galicia learned to live with the mystery.
Until now.
Because this year, when the water receded to its lowest level in decades, the earth finally revealed what it had kept buried.
🕯️ The Disappearance
It was August 17, 2010 — one of those warm, deceptive Galician afternoons when the sky glows like glass and the forest hums with life.
Ana Varela, 16, her cousin Lucas, 14, and David, 13, left home around 4:30 p.m. to go cycling near the reservoir. They never came back.
At sunset, their bikes were nowhere to be seen. A fisherman claimed he saw three figures near the dam wall before dusk, but that was the last sighting.
Search teams combed the woods, divers scoured the water, and helicopters circled for days. Nothing. No bikes. No clothes. No bodies.
When the case was declared an accident, not everyone agreed — but with no evidence, there was nothing left to fight.
“They said the current took them,” remembers Elena Varela, Ana’s mother.
“But I’ve lived by that water all my life. It doesn’t take. It hides.”
💧 The Reservoir’s Revenge
Fifteen years later, a brutal drought swept across Spain.
By late spring of 2025, the water level at A Fervenza had dropped by nearly 40 meters — the lowest in its recorded history.
The cracked earth of the reservoir began to expose long-lost stones, tree trunks… and something else.
On May 14, local farmer Martiño López spotted what looked like metal glinting in the sun.
“At first I thought it was farm equipment,” he told reporters. “Then I saw three of them — tangled together, like someone had tied them up.”
They were bicycles. Rusted, twisted, but still identifiable by color and brand.
One red. One blue. One yellow.
Police confirmed what the families had known in their hearts all along.
They belonged to Ana, Lucas, and David.
But what made the discovery unbearable was not the fact that the bikes were found — it was how they were found.
⛓️ The Chains
Each bicycle was chained together, welded through the frames with industrial links — the kind used to secure boats or heavy machinery.
Investigators said the bikes could not have been moved by the current or natural causes.
“Someone placed them there deliberately,” said Inspector Javier Cid. “Someone wanted them to stay there.”
The revelation shattered the “accident” theory overnight.
Forensic teams descended on the site, digging through the mud for weeks. The area was sealed off. What they found next made headlines across Europe.
🩸 The Discovery
A few meters from where the bikes lay, searchers uncovered a metal drum — buried under layers of clay. Inside, partially preserved by the anaerobic conditions, were human remains.
DNA testing confirmed what no one dared hope or fear:
the remains belonged to Ana, Lucas, and David.
But the condition of the bones told a horrifying story.
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They had fractures consistent with blunt force trauma, inflicted before they entered the water.
It was not an accident.
It was murder.
🕯️ A Village Haunted
The news hit Galicia like thunder. In the small town of Mazaricos, where the children had lived, church bells rang for three days.
Locals gathered at the reservoir’s edge with flowers and candles. Some prayed. Others simply stared into the empty basin, as if waiting for it to confess the rest of its secrets.
“We always felt something was wrong,” said local teacher Rosalía Pardo. “Kids don’t just vanish like that. Not here.”
🧩 The Investigation Reopened
The Civil Guard reopened the case within hours of the discovery.
A team of criminologists from Madrid was dispatched to Galicia to re-examine the original 2010 files. And already, questions have begun to surface.
The original report, signed by a now-retired officer, had several inconsistencies:
- Witness statements were missing.
- The fishermen’s sighting was never officially logged.
- One of the divers who participated in the 2010 search later reported being told to “stand down early.”
“It was sloppy at best, deliberate at worst,” said retired prosecutor Carlos Ruiz, who has been following the case. “Somebody didn’t want this case reopened — until nature did it for them.”
🧠 Theories and Suspects
At the center of the new investigation are a few chilling leads.
Police are reportedly focusing on a former construction foreman who worked on maintenance at the dam in 2010 — a man with a violent record who disappeared from the region a year later.
Another theory points toward a local land dispute: the Varela family had been outspoken against the expansion of the reservoir at the time, claiming it endangered nearby homes.
Family games
Could the children have seen something they weren’t supposed to?
No one knows for sure — but what’s certain is that their deaths were not random.
“The chains tell you everything,” said criminologist Dr. Laura Peña. “They were bound together — both literally and symbolically. Someone wanted them silenced, together.”
💔 The Families Speak
In the small white house overlooking the valley, Ana’s mother sits beside a window filled with fading photographs.
“We prayed for a miracle,” she says quietly. “We didn’t get one. But we got the truth. And sometimes, that’s the only miracle you get.”
Lucas’s father, Manuel, refuses to call the discovery closure.
“There’s no closure when evil like this exists,” he says. “There’s only justice — and we haven’t seen it yet.”
🕊️ A Land That Remembers
As autumn settles over Galicia, the water in A Fervenza is slowly rising again.
Soon, the muddy crater will vanish beneath the surface — taking with it the evidence of what was once hidden.
But this time, people know what lies beneath.
Every year, when the fog rolls across the valley and touches the surface of the reservoir, the locals say they can still hear bicycle bells — faint and distant — echoing across the water.
A reminder.
A warning.
A promise that some secrets never stay buried forever.
⚖️ Epilogue
The Spanish Ministry of the Interior has classified the case as an active triple homicide investigation.
Interpol has been alerted regarding several persons of interest believed to have fled abroad between 2011 and 2013.
A memorial for Ana, Lucas, and David is scheduled to be unveiled this spring near the reservoir’s observation point — three white bicycles cast in iron, forever linked together by chains, overlooking the water that tried to hide them.
The plaque reads simply:
“The earth returned what the lies took.”
And beneath it, three names etched in silence —
a reminder that truth, though buried, always finds a way to rise.
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