Couples enjoying their honeymoon — particularly those who got married in 2020 and had to wait two years for that blissful vacation — are normally looking for peace, predictability, and relaxation. Bristol couple Dave Squillante and Doran Smith were enjoying just such a day in Barcelona, Spain last week.

The only structured event was a 3 p.m. tour reservation at Park Güell, an iconic green space full of architectural delights.

“It was about a half hour walk north of our hotel,” said Doran. “We planned to spend the day in that neighborhood, Gràcia. We got up, had breakfast, walked to that neighborhood, did some shopping, went to a coffee shop, had some tapas, walked around.”

But on their way to the park, the idyllic day turned chaotic in the blink of an eye.

“We were walking on one of the old, windy streets in this town and across the street from us was a really old, four-story building,” Doran recalled. “A couple women came out and were on the sidewalk frantically yelling up at the women on the balconies above. Clearly something was happening. They were kind of freaking out.”

“I noticed there were flames coming out of the doorway next to the door they had come out of,” she continued. “I said, ‘Oh my god, there’s a fire.’”

What happened next, to the couple, was pure instinct.

“It’s kind of weird to keep telling this story because it doesn’t feel like really happened,” Dave said. “It was in an instant. She said ‘Fire,’ they were yelling at each other, and my goal was to get in there and see if I could help in any way.”

Doran, a Tiverton native, recalled seeing her husband throw down his backpack and immediately run into the building. She began filming on her phone, also out of instinct, to document the moment. But once she saw Dave come out of the building wheeling a crib with young children in it, she pocketed the phone and kicked into gear.

“It all happened so fast and it was so frantic and chaotic, but looking back it was cool seeing how everyone just jumped in to help,” she said.

Dave, a Bristol native, described walking into the building and seeing a large group of little kids, most of which were sleeping. He had found himself in a nursery school for infants and toddlers that was quickly filling up with smoke, and saw frantic school workers who were clearly in need of assistance locating and extricating children from the school.

“I kind of just spoke some simple Spanish to the teachers telling them to line up and get the kids in the cribs and we started rolling them outside,” Dave said. “Of course they were surprised…Like ‘I just took my after-milk nap and there’s this weirdo grabbing me.’”

As Dave and the school workers got kids out of the building, Doran was helping transport them to a high school across the street, where teenagers and other adults worked to try and calm the children down.

After getting out a large number of kids, Dave noticed a woman frantically saying something that he ascertained meant two were still unaccounted for. He scoured through the building, increasingly filling with smoke, and eventually found a kid within a play structure out back of the building, and grabbed him. The final kid, it turned out, had been in Doran’s arms.

“He’s not crying, he’s just squeezing my finger,” she recalled. “I’m standing across the street and Dave hadn’t come out yet. I’m just like standing across the street with this kid waiting for Dave and I’m like, ‘Oh I still have this child.’”

Firefighting crews arrived shortly after all the kids, 25 in all, were accounted for. The couple felt as though they had done what they could, so they walked away, towards a tour that they would undoubtedly be late for and, likely, did not hold the same relative excitement factor they perhaps anticipated that morning.

“It was so surreal because then we’re in the park looking at this architecture and it was like, ‘Remember that time we saved kids from a burning building?’” Doran said. “When I think about it now I’m like, ‘Did that actually happen?’”

Dave’s grandfather and father (both named George Seyez) were both long-time firefighters on the Defiance Hose Company in Bristol. Although Dave went a different direction, becoming a professional chef who is now in food sales, he did say that his firefighting pedigree might have had something to do with his actions that day.

“I think that definitely helped out a little bit. I kind of watched my dad and grandfather help people out in situations. It’s just instinct. But it also wasn’t just me,” he said. “I hope [sharing this story] helps other people who might be in that type of situation to do the same thing, to think about helping people.”