Walking the streets of Paiporta means seeing nature at its wildest.

There is chaos everywhere in this city. Lives were shattered, turned upside down and ended.

Latest flood in Spain: As the death toll in the flood exceeds 150, looting also increases

You can’t drive into Paiporta, a suburb about 4 miles southwest of Valencia, so we cover the last mile on foot. We pass by orchards for most of the walk. The sun is warming up.

It could be a normal day. But then you get to the city and normalcy disappears.

We turn a corner and find a road completely blocked by a wall of huddled cars.

Next door, a family is trudging through their garage under three feet of water.

There’s a strange pile of debris everywhere. Much of it is covered in thick, sticky mud that sticks to everything; the road, your clothes, and all those bits of daily life that get swept up and mixed together.

So there’s a kid’s shoe, a beer cooler, a sweater, a corkscrew, and a piece of engine block. It’s all messy, muddy and sad.

“We need to clean it up,” says the woman, looking at the endless water in her garage. His son comes in and takes out his things.

There were three motorcycles here, two of them new. They’re all ruined. Everything in sight was destroyed. But they know they are lucky.

Down the road, on the other side of the driveway, they knew a couple who had been in their car when the floodwaters came in with astonishing speed.

Both died; two of the forty people known to have died in this town so far.

The damage is completely random. A car lies absurdly on a children’s slide. Paving stones lie in a pile, and the front doors open to offer views of houses covered in water and mud.

There are people out there trying to remove water using brooms and shovels.

Further down the road we visit Catarroja, a beautiful town that normally hosts lots of tourists.

Now the main street is paved with gravel and as we enter we have to carefully avoid holes in the road, industrial rubbish bins rolled onto the street and a long queue of crumpled vehicles.

In fact, everywhere we go, the symbol of these floods is the cars carelessly thrown left and right, thrown into gardens, playgrounds, rivers, streams, on top of each other, and into houses.

They are smashed, overturned, dirty and broken, and the cars have broken a lot of things in return. When the water passed through these towns he took them and used them as weapons.

A woman walks past me and begs me to tell the world that they have no water or food. Everything was cut off, shops were closed.

Half an hour later, I see him and a friend walking down the street with a shopping cart full of food, arguing with other people. They quite clearly helped themselves to what they needed.

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Across the road is a boat half stuck in a tree. We are quite far out to sea and no one seems to know whose boat this is or where it came from.

But here it is, a symbol of how this flood creates such instantaneous, discordant chaos.

We meet Veronica walking with her two children. He takes them to grandparents whose house is out of town.

He told me they gave little warning before the flood; just earlier in the day there was a request for the children to be taken home from school because there was a storm on the way.

“One minute it was just raining and then there was two meters of water,” he says.

“It was very scary. People were injured and some people died. Now we have to help each other to repair this town.”

He looks around. “It will take a long time.”

There are happier stories, stories of survival and courage. Three young girls come to talk to us on the street and show a video of their father rescuing a man from the water when their path turns into a turbulent river (VIDEO AT TOP).

A local man named Luis is adrift, desperate for survival.

Their father, who is leaning out of the window of the apartment building where the family lives, has thrown a rope down and is holding on to it.

As we watch, you can hear the man’s screams and the shouts of encouragement from the audience.

He is slowly pulled out of the water and climbs over the balcony to safety.

The girls exploded with pride; Their father clearly saved this man’s life. In the midst of this horror, there are glimpses of courage and joy.