Do you believe in haunted houses? We don’t either, but we are sure that the myth of some of them started with a series of incidents like the ones that happened in Hotel Ávila located at Jerez in the south of Spain.
Hotel Ávila was a hotel managed by the Pacheco family. For sure, as a hotel the place experienced some incidental curious events, but our history starts when the original owners passed away.
The situation was typical. A couple of brothers inherited a building with a great value and it was impossible for them to get liquidity to pay the taxes.
Therefore, one of the brothers decided to sell the hotel for the same amount he had to pay in taxes, about 450 000 euros according to the cadastral value of more than 1.4 million euros. Sadly, the buyer never paid.
Since the heirs were not able to make this payment, the Junta de Andalucia (the regional government in Andalusia) sold it at auction with an initial price of 600 000 euros. Ironically, the same Junta de Andalucía is who decided to make an appraisal and did not use the cadastral value. However, nobody made a bid on it, and eventually it was sold for only 185.000 euros.
Of course, the heirs did not settle the debt with this. They still had to pay the difference between the debt and the real amount paid in the auction.
Beyond personal drama, it seems reasonable that if one has to pay taxes for something, the tax would take into consideration the market value instead of the cadastral value. In general, cadastral value is lower than market value because building revalorization is usually higher than inflation. But at least situations like these could have been avoided.
The story of the building did not end with this. After everything happened, it became a foreign children’s shelter. In Andalusia, these centers are usually used by underage people from Africa since many of them arrive to Spain by dinghy through the sea.
What could have been an honest end for the building was just another episode of the nightmare.
These last weeks the media has shown several charges stating that the shelter did not have healthy conditions. There were too many children, and they were not receiving Spanish classes. As a result of the bad conditions, many of the children just left the place (up to ten in only one day) and ended up on the streets.
The last episode is the scandal caused because the director of the center paid for the tickets for a bus ride to another city for at least two of the children, of course, without any caregiver.
News like this was in Andalusian newspapers every other day, partially motivated by the facts themselves and partially for the pressure against the succession tax made for some associations and political lobbies.