The elderly couple who protected themselves from the La Palma volcano in a boat [photos]

They did not like the temporary housing options. “I came up with the idea, we are going to try to go to the boat, it is an old boat that is there, but hey, we can take some things and settle in,” explains Luis Rodríguez Díaz, a retired digestive surgeon, to AFP. The “Hamurabi” boat is 6.4 meters long and is a long-suffering boat that in 35 years has only required one engine change. It welcomes Luis and his wife, the Dutch Margaretha Straates. They live with their backs to the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which does not stop signaling their presence through explosions. Margaretha and Luis spend their time in the back of the boat, with a radio, a small refrigerator, her computer -with Wi-Fi access- and a cat adopted in her flight that hides in the forward cabin when she sees the journalists.The place is small and requires some contortion, not always well resolved, because Margaretha hits her head every time she enters the cabin – “I’ve already had three bumps,” she laments.

“Very badly”

Both lived in Todoque, a town practically wiped off the map by lava, and had to leave their homes in a hurry. “The Civil Guard arrived there and told us: ‘you have to evacuate, but immediately, quickly.’ And there we got away with what we had on,” he says. They never imagined that the eruption would be so violent and destructive – it has already erased more than 1,000 buildings -, fooled, like many, by the precedent of the Teneguía volcano, in 1971, “which was a friendly volcano and destroyed very little,” she says. As of Sunday, they knew that their house was standing, but that was not enough to calm the uneasiness: “we are very badly, very badly”, she affirms, resorting to a very local turn. The married couple is talkative, lively and shows very good spirits in the face of adversity, perhaps helped by a life of changes. He is Spanish, from El Ferrol (northwest) and she is Dutch, from Amsterdam. In the mid-1950s, Luis’s sister gave him a trip to Europe as a reward for having passed a medical degree. “I was in a park in Amsterdam with my best friend and we met the sexiest man I had ever seen,” recalls Margaretha, who was then 16 years old.

Amsterdam, Gibraltar, Zimbabwe, La Palma …

They exchanged their addresses and got married some time later in Gibraltar, because in Spain there was only religious marriage. Among other places they lived in London and Zimbabwe, then British Rhodesia, in which Luis became “the highest health authority in an area the size of Galicia”. In 1977 they estimated that it was time to return to Spain, due to the instability in the British colony that would end three years later in independence, but also due to the death of the dictator Francisco Franco (1939-1975), a Ferrolan like Luis. “Now that the previous Franco regime is gone, it is better to go to Spain because I am getting older,” Luis said to himself, fearing “he will never return.” Sixty years of marriage, two weeks in a small space, and a volcanic eruption give for some discussion, but they resolve them with elegance. They are recognizable figures in the port of Tazacorte, which these days attracts dozens of curious because it is one of the few points on the island from where you can see both the cone of Cumbre Vieja and the path of lava and its cascade into the sea. . In the port there are showers, washing machines, and restaurants, and they also usually go up to the town daily. “Nobody, nobody” can tell them when they will be able to return home, regrets Margaretha, who confirms with Luis that this Sunday football has taken away the role of the volcano on the radio.