Original text published by No es época para tontos.
An 87-year-old woman. A 71-year-old home. A wheelchair, an ambulance and a police deployment surrounding the only place she had known for most of her life.
On 23 September 2026, Maricarmen was removed from her home at Calle Alcalde Sainz de Baranda 46, in Madrid’s Retiro district. She had a recognised 50% disability, limited mobility and had lived in the property for 71 years. What happened that morning is the starting point of this investigation — but not its conclusion.
The central question is far larger: how can a home occupied for an entire lifetime be legally transformed into a financial asset whose profitability depends on removing the person living inside it?
Maricarmen’s tenancy originated in 1956. She was paying around €500 a month and living on a pension of approximately €1,350–€1,450. After the building changed hands, Urba Gestión Desarrollo e Inversión demanded a rent reportedly ranging between €1,650 and €2,650 a month — an increase the investigation places between 247% and 275%.
She fought back.
In January 2022, Madrid Court No. 90 rejected the company’s claim and Maricarmen won at first instance. But the decision was later reversed by the Provincial Court of Madrid, which interpreted the rules governing the second subrogation of the old tenancy differently. The Supreme Court subsequently declined to admit the cassation appeal, making the eviction enforceable.
The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reportedly requested that the eviction be suspended because of the risk of irreparable harm. An anonymous donor offered to cover the rent difference. Spain’s Housing Ministry attempted mediation. According to the investigation, none of these attempts prevented the eviction.
From this individual case, the documentary follows the money.
It examines the transformation of housing after the 2008 financial crisis, when enormous portfolios of distressed property entered the orbit of banks, servicers, SOCIMIs and international private-equity groups such as Lone Star, Blackstone and Cerberus. It explores an economic model in which an occupied property with an old or protected rent can be viewed as an underperforming asset — while an empty property can suddenly become much more valuable.
And the trail does not stop at Spain.
The investigation follows financial structures connecting Spain and Andorra, including investment vehicles, private-equity distribution and companies linked to major financial groups. Its argument is not that these structures are clandestine or inherently illegal. Quite the opposite: the disturbing element explored here is how much of this architecture operates openly and within existing financial and corporate law.
Then comes politics.
In early 2026, Congress debated measures associated with the so-called social shield, including protections for vulnerable tenants. According to the documentary, PP, Vox and Junts combined their votes against the measures. The investigation is careful not to claim that those MPs personally ordered Maricarmen’s eviction. Its criticism is structural: when political institutions withdraw protections during a housing emergency, the financial risk does not disappear — it is transferred downward to the tenant.
The focus then moves to Girona and former mayor and Junts MP Marta Madrenas. The documentary reviews her professional background in the real-estate sector and examines a 2023 transaction in which Girona City Council purchased a property from Coral Homes for more than €131,000, shortly after Coral Homes had been involved in litigation concerning the attempted eviction of a vulnerable person.
The investigation explicitly states that there is no evidence of bribery, corruption or illegal preferential treatment in that purchase. Its argument is political rather than criminal: major institutional property actors have become so normalised that the same entities litigating against vulnerable residents can simultaneously operate as ordinary suppliers to public administrations.
The documentary also examines Madrenas’s parliamentary argument: that the state should not force private owners to finance social policy, that forced extensions can create legal uncertainty and that insufficient public housing is ultimately a failure of government. The programme presents that argument before confronting it with the consequences of the system it describes.
Because somebody always pays.
If the state refuses the cost, the investor refuses the cost and the landlord is protected from the cost, the burden eventually reaches the weakest person in the chain.
In this case, that person was Maricarmen.
An 87-year-old woman removed from the home in which she had accumulated 71 years of memories.
The final question is therefore not simply whether the law was broken. The documentary argues that the more disturbing possibility is that the machinery worked exactly as designed.
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