This Wednesday, October 29, 2025, Valencia hosts an event of great symbolic and emotional charge: the State funeral for the victims of DANA on October 29, 2024. The tribute, presided over by Kings Felipe and Letiziawill bring together about 800 people in the City of Arts and Sciences and will begin at six in the afternoon. The person in charge of conducting the ceremony is the Valencian journalist Lara Siscarreference face of Spanish Television.
The funeral will take place at the Príncipe Felipe Science Museum, where the attendance of more than 800 people between national, regional and local authorities, as well as representatives of the emergency bodies and relatives of the victims. Its approximate duration will be an hour and a half and the tone will be sober, without religious connotations.
The Generalitat has decreed official mourning throughout the day: from 00:00 to 24:00, flags will fly at half-mast in all public buildings in the Valencian Community.
The choice of Lara Siscar to guide this tribute is no coincidence. Born in Gandía in 1977, she studied Audiovisual Communication at the Ramon Llull University of Barcelona, although initially began his career in pharmacy on the Burjassot campus. “I didn’t just see myself in a pharmacy,” he explained in an interview with The Provinces“I felt that I needed training that would allow me to interact with people who had stories to tell.”
His professional career took off in 2007, when he joined Radiotelevisión Española. Since then, it has been on Canal 24 Horas, The afternoon in 24 hours, The night in 24 hoursthe weekend news programs and the program Weekly Reportwhich he presented from March 2024 until a few weeks ago. Currently, he serves as TVE correspondent in Lisbon.
Regarding DANA, she herself confessed to RTVE that DANA’s coverage was one of the most difficult moments of his career: “It was a huge impact, because we reported on towns that he knew, with friends and acquaintancesRegarding how she faces these very emotional episodes, Lara shared that: “When you are in a place where something tragic has happened and you have to tell it, you do it with a certain coldness, just like a surgeon when it operates.” That professional distance allows her, as she herself points out, “not to break down while reporting.”
With a career spanning almost two decades, the journalist has also presented institutional events such as the National Research Awards, held in her native Gandia in 2024, and the Cream of the Fallas of 2022, the first after the pandemic. His professionalism and his link with the Valencian Community explain the choice of his name to conduct this State tribute, in which respect, mourning and collective memory are mixed.
Beyond her career in the media, Lara Siscar has also become a symbol of resistance against digital violence. In 2018 he publicly recounted the harassment that he suffered for more than seven years by two men who harassed her on social networks. In an interview with Readingsconfessed to having gone through stages of fear and despair: “I have been afraid that he would become a flesh and blood threat, but I reached a point where I went from being afraid to wishing that he would appear. I wanted to have him in front of me.”
The harassment began on Twitter, when one of his followers he began to write to her insistently and demanded attention. “When I wanted to break that relationship, the obsession and threats began,” he explained. Despite going to the police, he encountered the limitations imposed by large platforms to identify the perpetrators of this type of crime. “Companies that exploit networks make it impossible to find out who commits the crime and leave you defenseless,” he lamented.
Over time, Siscar learned to cope with the situation and turn his experience into a tool for raising awareness. “I have learned to live with that, to relativize his attacks. I have even learned to laugh at him, although I had a very bad time“, she assured. Her testimony was key to making digital harassment of women visible in the public sphere.
Part of his literary vocation was also born from that episode. In his novel The Louvre Watchman (2015), partially inspired by her personal experience, addressed the issue of harassment and violence against women. Three years later, he published black flowerswhere a radio host is involved in a social media scandal. In both works, the journalist uses fiction as a form of denunciation and reflection on the multiple forms of violence suffered by women.
