Injured cyclist airlifted to hospital from Monte Picayo, in Puçol
Firefighters from the Sagunto station took part this Tuesday in the helicopter rescue of an injured cyclist on Monte Picayo hill, in Puçol, who was flown to Sagunto Hospital for treatment.
A fall on Monte Picayo hill on the outskirts of the district was resolved this Tuesday with an air evacuation: the Valencia Provincial Fire Service Consortium flew a cyclist who injured her leg while riding in that mountainous area, within Puçol's boundary, to Sagunto Hospital by helicopter.
Emergency services received the call at 10:31am this Tuesday morning. The incident was first placed in Sagunto, though the Consortium later corrected that: the operation actually took place on Monte Picayo, in the municipality of Puçol, very close to the Camp de Morvedre border. Corrections like this are fairly common in mountain call-outs: initial reports tend to rely on the best-known nearby municipality or the approximate location given by whoever raises the alarm, and are only pinned down precisely once crews reach the scene. According to Wikipedia, the housing developments in that part of Monte Picayo straddle the boundary shared between Puçol and Sagunto, which is exactly why the accident's location caused that initial mix-up between the two municipalities.
Crews sent to the scene included the Special High-Altitude Rescue Group (GERA) with the MV6-R helicopter, firefighters from the Sagunto station, and a sergeant leading the operation. Difficult land access to that particular stretch of the hill led the specialists to go straight for an air evacuation once the woman had been found and stabilised. Beyond cutting response times drastically, airlifting also lets crews stabilise an injured person before a bumpy, winding drive down mountain tracks can turn what looks like a manageable injury at the point of rescue into something more serious.
Using a medical helicopter is common on Monte Picayo, an area heavily used by cyclists and hikers from neighbouring towns, including Sagunto, where a road rescue would be far slower. Coordination between the district's different fire stations, including Sagunto's, is equally common in this kind of mountain incident, since no single station in the area is fully equipped or staffed to handle every rescue alone.
GERA is a specialist Consortium unit that responds to mountain and offshore rescues whenever conventional land resources cannot reach the person in time, and its helicopter deployment on Monte Picayo is not an isolated event: the area sees similar rescues almost every season, as more hikers and mountain cyclists use its trails, especially between spring and autumn. Recreational use of these hills has grown sharply in recent years, alongside a broader boom in cycle tourism and hiking as a weekend leisure option across much of the Valencian Community, which also multiplies the number of people exposed to this kind of accident in hard-to-reach areas.
For Camp de Morvedre's municipalities, this kind of event is also a reminder of how far the district's emergency response relies on shared resources: even when the accident happens outside Sagunto's own boundaries, it is Sagunto's firefighters and hospital that carry much of the response, a sharing of resources that rarely becomes visible outside episodes like this one and is rarely planned around a single municipality in isolation.
Emergency services often point out, after incidents like this one, that in mountain areas with patchy mobile coverage it is worth carrying a charged phone and letting someone know the planned route before setting off to cycle or hike, since a seemingly minor fall can end up requiring as large a rescue effort as this Tuesday's. That advice matters most precisely in stretches like Monte Picayo, where a mobile signal can drop out for long sections of a trail and where the nearest paved road may be a considerable walk away for someone who cannot move under their own power.
The Consortium has not given further details on the cyclist's condition after admission or on how the fall happened, a level of discretion that is standard practice in these cases to protect the privacy of the person rescued. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional data from Wikipedia.