A British man on holiday in Spain was found dead in a Spanish airport while waiting for the flight that would spirit him back home to Britain. The tourist, who was believed to be in his sixties, collapsed in the boarding area at Reus Airport, which is located near the east coast city of Tarragona on the Iberian Costa Dorada. The man was waiting to board the Ryanair plane which would return him to Leeds.
According to local reports, the man had just been released from a Tarragona hospital where he was treated for unknown medical issues.
Police and paramedics who were summoned to the scene worked diligently but were unable to revive him. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
His body was handed over to the local coroner who will perform an autopsy. Authorities currently expect that the postmortem medical examination will reveal that he died of natural causes. Police sources say that no foul play is suspected.
Such events are not as rare as one might expect. Reus Airport has seen a number of such incidents in recent years.
In October of 2023, a 61-year-old British tourist died at the same airport as he sat aboard a Jet2 aircraft that was awaiting clearance to take off and head for East Midlands Airport. As a result of the death, the aircraft was delayed nearly seven hours.
Back in September of 2019, a female customer of Thomas Cook, who was sixty-seven years old at the time, died shortly after arriving at Reus. A German nurse, who was also on holiday, was available at the scene to assist, and began administering first aid protocols before the paramedics arrived, but despite the immediate attention the woman died at the scene after suffering a cardiac arrest. Paramedics used a defibrillator on her to no avail.
As an increasing percentage of the holidaymaker population is drawn from the elderly, incidents like this have grown more common.