Fire breaks out overnight in an abandoned house on Avenida Andoni Sarasola, Sagunto
The Valencia Provincial Fire Service Consortium put out an overnight fire in an abandoned house on Avenida Andoni Sarasola in Sagunto early on Thursday, with no injuries reported.
An emergency call at 4:34am on Thursday alerted the Valencia Provincial Fire Service Consortium (Consorcio Provincial de Bomberos de Valencia) to a fire in an abandoned house on Avenida Andoni Sarasola, in Sagunto. Two crews from the Sagunto fire station, led by a sergeant, worked through the early hours to put out the flames before they could spread to nearby buildings. The house was unoccupied at the time, so no injuries were reported and no residents needed to be evacuated.
The avenue where the fire broke out is named after Andoni Sarasola Martínez, a Basque engineer born in 1917 and who died in 2006, who led the Compañía Minera Sierra Menera (a mining company) between 1947 and 1967. Sagunto City Council honoured him posthumously in 2008 by naming this avenue after him, in recognition of his role leading one of the companies that shaped the mining and industrial history linked to the town for much of the 20th century.
The avenue has seen recent public investment. A full renovation completed in December 2021 included new pavements, a bike lane, upgraded street lighting and full repaving, at a total cost of €418,163.66, of which the Valencian regional government (Generalitat Valenciana) contributed €250,000 through the Construïm Pobles plan. Before that work, the City Council itself described the area as run-down and rarely used, meaning the renovation was meant to bring life back to a spot that, four years later, has made the news again because of a fire in one of its empty buildings.
The body that responded, the Valencia Provincial Fire Service Consortium, was set up on 31 October 1986 and is now Spain's largest emergency consortium by staff numbers. As of 2023, it covered 243 of the province's 267 municipalities — 91% of the total — with around 1,200 firefighters on its payroll. That province-wide structure is what allows crews to be deployed quickly even in the middle of the night, as happened in this case in Sagunto.
This is not the first time an empty building has caught fire in the town. According to noticiascv.com, in September 2024 firefighters responded to a fire at another abandoned building under construction in Sagunto, and again found no one inside on arrival. Months later, in March 2026, the same outlet reported a larger fire at an occupied home on Calle Escalante, in Puerto de Sagunto (the coastal district), which reached the first and second floors; in that case, the two residents had already left the building by the time firefighters arrived and were in good health.
Empty or disused buildings, like the one that caught fire overnight, tend to carry a higher fire risk because of accumulated materials and occasional informal occupation, though in this case there is no indication anyone was inside. Authorities have not yet given the cause of the fire, or said whether the building will face any follow-up municipal action, such as fencing it off or demolition — steps the council has taken on other empty plots in the town after similar incidents.
For now, the outcome of the overnight response is a controlled fire with no injuries, on an avenue that received more than €400,000 in public investment less than four years ago to completely change its look and everyday use by residents. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional background from Wikipedia on Andoni Sarasola Martínez and the Valencia Provincial Fire Service Consortium, and from Sagunto City Council on the avenue's renovation.