RESCUERS scoured the region around the Virgen de las Nieves campsite yesterday, looking for the bodies of as many as 40 people still missing following Wednesday's freak deluge.
Frogmen were searching the Gallego river near a dam located downhill from the Las Nievas campsite, and army and Guardia Civil forces were combing an area of up to 10 km around the camp.
A number of bodies have been located, notably near the Sabinanigo dam, but had not yet been recovered and incorporated into the tally of victims, rescuers said.
Officials said they had given up hope of finding further survivors. "We're putting everything we've got into it, but, of course, there's no hope now of finding anyone alive," said Gen Luis Palacios, head of the regional brigade of mountain guides.
The Aragon regional administration issued an interim toll setting the number of dead at 70, basing the figure on the number of bodies recovered to date. Two bodies were found early yesterday, and five more in the early afternoon.
Uncertainty surrounded the number of people missing, since the number of people at the holiday site was not known. Regional officials said that between 630 and 660 holiday makers had been packed into the camp.
Around 60 of the 150 people injured in the disaster were still in hospital yesterday.
As messages of condolence began to arrive from other countries, initially from Germany and Norway, specialists and local experts defended regional officials against media criticism of security arrangements at the campsite.
"You had to take into account every possible parameter, geological or climatic, in mountain regions, nothing would ever be built," an expert at the Spanish Pyrenean Ecology Institute said. "It is pointless to blame the director of the campsite or the Biescas town council or even the regional authorities," he said.
Responding to press comments arguing that local authorities should not have allowed the campsite to open in such a "dangerous zone" at the foot of a mountain and near a river, he noted that the Arronco Aria river that surrounds the campsite was almost invariably dry, apart from a few days in spring when the snows are melting.
The daily El Mundo had said the weather services had warned of heavy rain in the Biescas region on Wednesday and that the local authorities should have issued a warning. Several newspapers quoted a geology expert as saying the campsite had been "a catastrophe in the making."
Regional authorities responded by saying they had taken all the necessary precautions, and insisted there had been effective security at the site.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Francisco Alvarez Cascos, who inspected the campsite yesterday, said the disaster had been a "very localised phenomenon" which even the best meteorological services could not have predicted.
The Environment Minister, Ms Isabel Tocino, said the site had respected security norms and that the disaster had been due to "a natural extraordinary cause."
The German Chancellor, Dr Kohl, and President Roman Herzog sent messages to their Spanish counterparts expressing their condolences for the victims of the disaster - mostly Spanish as did King Harald V of Norway and his foreign minister, Mr Bjoern Tore Godal.
The great majority of the victims of the floods were Spanish, but about 40 foreigners had been at the site, mainly from Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Among the dead were at least three foreign nationals, Amaya Mingo Armendariz, aged 10, and Claude Ruby (50), from France, and Dutch national, L. A. A. Platjo Kuijpers, according to officials on the spot.
The Dutch consulate in Barcelona added that four members of a Dutch family had also died.