Nelson Torrealba said a quick goodbye to his wife and two sons and called out that he would be back soon before jumping into his car to pick up some groceries last Wednesday.
It was around 6pm as he pulled away from their luxury seaside apartment building in northern Venezuela’s La Guaira region. Suddenly he felt a strong breeze through the car’s open windows, before the earth shook violently beneath him.
The building’s security guard screamed at him to jump from the vehicle. Then, from the ground, he heard an enormous crash behind him.
“There was a very dense yellow cloud of dust so thick… you couldn’t see,” he recalls.
As the dust began to settle, he looked towards where his building had stood just moments before. Nothing remained but a jagged mountain of rubble. “In the time I turned around, there was nothing left,” he says.
Nelson lived in a seventh-floor apartment at the Ritasol Palace with his wife, Dallenyi, and their two sons, 14-year-old Samuel and 10-year-old Matías. It was the only home the boys had ever known.
“It was paradise – comfort, security. A Saturday here was football games on the court with the kids, bicycles, pool and beach,” he says.
But it was perhaps the time the family spent inside their apartment that Nelson treasured the most.
If he was having a bad day, he would come home and ask Matías for a hug to help “recharge my energy.”
“He would say, ‘Let’s go Daddy,’ and he would embrace me and say, ‘What percentage of your battery have you recharged?’ I’d say, ‘I still need more.’ He’d say, ‘You have 90%,’ and then he’d be like, ‘Daddy, that’s it. 100% now.’”
“It was an incredible comfort,” he says.
“I could come in from the street with a lot of problems, but when I saw my children’s faces, I was reset,” he adds before quietly weeping.
Venezuela is prone to earthquakes, but surviving residents say they had never felt unsafe in Ritasol Palace. Some speak of it as a sanctuary.
The 11-storey building was divided into apartments and holiday accommodation, with sea views on one side, and mountains on the other.
It had a large swimming pool surrounded by palm trees, overlooking the sea, and a basketball court. There were cafes and bars nearby and rows of lounge chairs on the beach located just across the road.
But last Wednesday, the building was flattened almost instantly – along with many others in La Guaira – when two huge earthquakes struck.
“It didn’t fall gradually, it didn’t give anyone a chance to run or hide,” says Nelson, as he overlooks the ruins.
The water in the swimming pool is now blackened, filled with furniture and debris.
Traces of the lives once lived inside its apartments now lie among the rubble – smiling faces in a wooden photo frame, floral bed sheets, a child’s pair of rubber boots.
Surviving residents say official search efforts ended on Saturday, when – after an 11-year-old boy was rescued alive – it was declared that there were no more signs of life.
The date was spray painted onto a wall by rescuers, along with other details – like the one survivor they found here and the 22 bodies they estimated to be under the rubble.
After the earthquakes hit, Nelson ran towards the rubble, screaming the names of his wife and sons.
“There was no answer. Everything was very confusing. There was silence, but then a lot of noise – ambulances, vehicle alarms. It was too much,” he says.
He started to hear the voices of neighbours, who were trapped but alive, calling back to him. But at that moment he could think only of his wife and sons.
Among the neighbours trapped in the rubble was Angélica Mundarain.