Pain in Spain: journalist Sandra Carmona died at the age of 42

Spanish journalism mourns the death of Sandra Carmona. The journalist died suddenly at dawn from Wednesday to Thursday of a heart attack in her home, local media reported. She was 42 years old and the mother of a girl and a boy.

The La Rioja Press Association in northern Spain released a statement to share “its sadness” after the tragic news broke. A sadness shared “with all of us who knew her and, above all, with her current colleagues in the Ministry of Health and with the communication team of the government of La Rioja that she joined during the pandemic”.

Carmona, born in Calahorra on June 5, 1980, she became director of health communication in the socialist government in September 2021, at the hand of councilor Sara Alaba. Before that, she was a presenter and editor of Rioja Televisión and Diario La Rioja, in Spain.

As explained by the Press Association, “Sandra’s unexpected loss” left her colleagues “destroyed by pain, unable to find words and without consolation”. “Our deepest condolences also to the good friends he made among his colleagues from his previous professional stages in TVR, La Rioja and Punto Radio Calahorra, the city where he was born and where he has continued to reside.”

The president of La Rioja, Concha Andreu, lamented the loss of Carmona. “It’s a tragic day. Sandra Carmona has left us. A wonderful person and an outstanding professional who joined the government to work tirelessly for all the people of La Rioja. We will miss you,” she wrote on her Twitter account.

Her colleagues fired her with heartfelt words: “Life goes on and takes us, they say. Which is the law of all this too. But what a disgusting law, really. How unfair and painful and blind it is”.

“One would like to be able to tell those who don’t know her who Sandra Carmona was. Perhaps they already know something about her: a magnificent journalist, a great communicator, one of those faces that appeared on TV and made you believe what they were saying. Perhaps because out of screen also had that virtue. Sandra spread confidence wherever she went. One looked at her and believed it and trusted it. And she always did well”.

“In front of and behind the camera it was like this, and the pain that today runs through the tables of colleagues who have shared so many years with her at TVR testifies. It was light and didn’t have to go off so soon.”