Seeing roadside assistance take centre stage in a feature article is cause for celebration. If the subject is also a REAC member, a dose of pride is added. Grúas Miguelón, in the El Ejido magazine Vintage.
It is a pleasure to see the career of one of our REAC members covered by the media. In this case, by Vintage, a magazine published in El Ejido (Almería). The town where a true “character with a history” was born: Francisco Muñoz Fernández (better known as Paco), founder of Grúas Miguelón. A character who is already living history in the world of tow trucks and roadside assistance.
“A man who made himself from a young age.” This is how the text begins, reviewing the personal and professional life of Paco, born in 1951 in El Ejido, at that time an “unspoilt and lovely” small village where child labour was the norm (our man started to get calluses at the age of nine), in families that were generally large and poor.
From a very young age Paco was interested in the world of workshops. Owing to various health and family ups and downs, he ended up becoming first a mechanic, and then the owner of Grúas Miguelón, a true benchmark for roadside assistance in western Almería.
The man and the tow truck: inseparable
Happily married to Francisca Miras (his business partner), with whom he has two daughters (Silvia and Beatriz, now at the helm of Grúas Miguelón), Muñoz Fernández explains that the project began like this: “one San Isidro day, a sergeant told me, while I was fixing a vehicle for him, that they needed a tow truck”. And no, he did not buy one: he built it. But first he talked it over with Francisca. They had to go all the way to France to buy a platform, which they would mount on a small truck they had previously acquired.
Paco has undoubtedly been a true pioneer in the roadside assistance sector. Proof of this is what he himself recounts: “[...] The engineer I explained the project to spent two years getting the tow truck through the ITV at La Pipa in Almería”. Since then, the tow truck has been his inseparable companion, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
What was the roadside assistance sector like in the seventies?
“Back then there was no 061 or anything. In those days it was the Guardia Civil officers and I who attended accidents on the road,” Paco recalls. The founder of Grúas Miguelón says it was about saving lives and preventing greater tragedies, hence the respect there was for the profession. “The 061 of those days was Amadora's Simca 1200, which served as taxi, ambulance and hearse,” he sums up. Conditions were extremely precarious.
It is no surprise that in 2019 it was precisely the firefighters and emergency services (061) of Almería who paid tribute to him. He also received a Bronze Medal for Work from the former minister José Barrionuevo. Now he is only thinking of hanging up his blue overalls to rest with his life partner and the rest of the family, grandson and granddaughter included. He has certainly earned it.
Photo: Paco Muñoz (Vintage magazine). Source: Vintage.