María de Orube Echeveste, 82, survived the ETA attack in T4 of Madrid airport in 2006 and now, deaf and in a wheelchair ever since, she is trying to win the battle against the entrepreneurs who want to throw her out of her house. The project: convert an ancient and protected building, in the middle of Gran Vía, into a hotel complete with luxury tourist apartments, according to the model envisaged by the new Residential Plan approved by the City of Madrid. The problem: María de Orube continues to live there and has no intention of leaving. “Where will I go at my age?” you ask.
They can’t even evict her. He has an old lease that guarantees him the right to stay in the house and he has always paid on time. That’s why the pressure started. From illegal work that he doesn’t hear, but is known for the vibration of the walls, to the placement of a hydromassage pool above his living room, whose roof, which overlooks a non-passable roof terrace, has no floors and can collapse due to the weight.
María’s case is that of many other people who live in rented properties sought after by investors due to their location, but she has a particularity. The building was built by his grandfather, Caminos Alfonso Peña Boeurf, and belonged to the family until his grandmother sold it to Banco Vitalicia. “They took her to dinner, made her happy and she sold the building without telling her son,” says Monike Oggerin, María’s daughter and great-granddaughter of the entrepreneur.
Luckily for her, María already lived in that house with a rental contract she had with her grandmother and that’s why she never had to leave. The eight-storey building has changed hands and, since the first tourist apartment was inaugurated in 2020, has been gradually emptied of its usual neighbors. In its place came tourists willing to pay between 163 and 628 euros per night in a building overlooking Madrid’s Gran Vía and the Torre España, the current Hotel Riu. However, none of these apartments have a license for this activity and, although there are cease and desist orders from the Activities Agency, they are still offered on the website of the company that manages them and are operating at full capacity.
According to Pablo Sánchez, owner of the company that manages the houses, none of the floors of that building are tourist apartments, but rather seasonal rentals, although it is enough to go down the stairs to encounter a group of people dragging suitcases. He explains the trick: “The Community of Madrid does not set a limit of days to determine whether they are tourist or seasonal rentals,” he explains. In order to operate, you recognize that you sign an agreement with your guests in which both parties consider the rental to be seasonal, even if it is only for one night. “The regulations in Madrid are more lax than you think,” he boasts. For this reason, he assures this newspaper without giving it much importance, he does not care if María de Orube leaves or stays.
He says this because of the Reside Plan, approved by the City of Madrid in May, with which he could regularize the situation of his apartments without having to overturn the law to declare them seasonal. According to the new legislation, tourist apartments in the center of the capital must be located in buildings reserved exclusively for this use and it is precisely there that María de Orube begins to annoy investors. As long as she lives there, the building’s 13 tourist floors will remain illegal, according to the report of inspectors who went there in August.
Although Pablo Sánchez stresses that this is a misinterpretation and that he is calm about the legal situation of the houses, the pressure on the woman to leave her house has intensified since January: audio in which the owner of the building threatens to report her and her daughter for allegedly insulting a construction worker; the works themselves, without license or technical studies, according to the latest inspection of the City of Madrid; the building owner’s refusal to replace the mechanical platform she needs to go up and down the portal stairs in a wheelchair… “When I call him to install it, he tells me: ‘If you don’t like it, leave,’” she says.
Furthermore, the building, completed in 1928, enjoys the highest level of heritage protection. This did not prevent the company that manages the apartments from carrying out the work without any kind of control. “These works were underway without the mandatory permit to cover them,” a city hall inspector wrote in August after visiting the building. This report also states that a “property crime” may be committed.
“Gran Vía 73 is the paradigm of the great problem that Madrid has today: impunity and all the benefits that the PP offers to large property owners”, says Lucía Lois, councilor of Más Madrid. “Those who live in rent today will find themselves on the streets if the owner decides to transform their entire condominium into a tourist condominium,” adds the councilor.
In an increasingly hostile climate, María de Orube knows that making her story known means taking a risk. “Everyone keep in mind that this will have consequences, but it has to be done,” he warns in front of his two daughters in the living room of his home moments after agreeing to be photographed for this report.
“What kind of consequences?”
“I’m a mafia,” he replies.
