Selfie Tragedy: Parents Fall 260 Feet Off Cliff To Deaths While Taking Selfie As Kids Watch

A mom and dad in Portugal were vacationing at the scenic Cabo da Roca, a popular tourist destination that marks the westernmost point in that country, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, when they decided to take a selfie, according to Portuguese authorities.

They tried to take the selfie at the edge of a cliff with what would surely have been a spectacular vista of the ocean behind them. Tragically, authorities say, they somehow lost their footing while attempting to snap the picture and plummeted 80 meters — about 260 feet — straight down into the icy waters of the Atlantic below.

Perhaps even more heartbreaking, the married couple’s two children, ages five and six, were with them at Cabo da Roca and watched helplessly in horror as their parents slipped and vanished from view, plunging to their deaths.

Names of the deceased mom and dad were not released, but police said they were Polish nationals. Monika Dulian of Poland’s Lisbon consulate said that the family were not simply tourists but had resided full-time in Portugal for the past several years.

Dulian told Polish radio that the couple had reportedly breached a safety barrier designed to keep sightseers away from the edge of the cliff, but that otherwise, no details of the deadly accident were available.

The two children have been placed under psychiatric care following the traumatizing incident and are now in the custody of the Polish consulate as they wait for relatives from Poland to arrive in Portugal.

Captain Dario Pinto Moreira, a port official in Cascais which is a Lisbon suburb and the nearest major municipality to Cabo da Roca, first reported that the couple met with their fatal accident due to slipping off the cliff while attempting to take a selfie.

With the craze for selfies apparently gone worldwide, the devastating tragedy in Portugal is just the latest case of a person taking a selfie in a dangerous setting, only to meet with disaster.

In June, a teenage Italian girl fell 60 feet to her death while snapping a selfie on the edge of a jagged, seaside rock formation.

In April, in Russia where risk-taking has seemingly become a way of life, another teen girl fell off a railroad bridge onto high-voltage wires, dying of electrocution for the sake of a selfie.

Just last week, a 21-year-old Mexican man was attempting to capture a selfie whole posing with a gun pointed at his own forehead, in an incident that ended in sadly predictable fashion.