Any Carles Porta fans in the room? If you have seen ‘Crims’ or some of his other documentary series, you already know the enormous impact that Catalan true crime has. But Ciudad Real has his own black chronicle. And it is perhaps one of the darkest and most unknown stories of our country. And, therefore, more interesting to unravel.
If every city has its cursed hill, on the outskirts of Ciudad Real La Atalaya stands out, with privileged views and a legend that has been feeding itself for decades. We have it all: lady in white, psychophonies and there is something much more prosaic and sadder, which is nothing other than a building that never served its purpose and houses a tragedy that mythology ended up devouring.
With tuberculosis tea, not terror. In 1943, the Ciudad Real city council bought those lands. At the request of the Patronage of Tuberculosis Patients, La Atalaya was part of a Franco plan of thirty-five anti-tuberculosis sanatoriums spread throughout Spain. The hill met the condition required by the national competition: sufficient isolation to avoid contagion, but not so much as to make access difficult.
In 1954, work began and in February 1955, the first floor was ready, with capacity for three hundred beds. The problem is that medicine moved faster than brick: by the time the building could be opened, antibiotics had already drastically reduced cases of tuberculosis in Spain. Before housing a single patient, the sanatorium was born obsolete.
Without job or benefit. Good location and good brick, but it was time to reform. In 1961, ownership of the building passed to the National Psychiatric Trust. The works are even slower and are not completed until 1970. A year later, in 1971, the building finally opens its doors as a regional center for people with mental disabilities. Or that’s how it was defined.
And it operated like this for twenty-five years, until its final closure in 1996. From then on it was abandoned. Cobwebs, thefts, noises and a black legend that is gaining strength: rumors of mistreatment of inmates, screams of torture that can still be heard and a three-meter figure walking through the empty hallways. I would like Slender Man or the monster from ‘Backrooms‘ have so much presence.
The real tragedy occurred. Easter 1987, early morning of April 20. It’s not a song. That morning, a 33-year-old police officer, Isidro Mejías, unloads his service weapon at a Citroën Visa where a young couple, María del Mar Perales Serrano and Alfredo Lozano Galán, ages 19 and 21, are. He then got into the victims’ own car and shot himself in the temple. What just happened? The Lanza newspaper titled the April 22 cover: “A police officer, alleged perpetrator of the death of two young people in La Atalaya.”
The door locks were locked, suggesting the couple saw danger coming and tried to protect themselves by locking themselves inside. According to those close to the agent, married and father of two children, he led a normal life and had no known serious problems; The victims’ family did not know him at all either. Without a motive, the urban legend was later filled with crimes of passion, sects and curses. Today a plaque at the site remembers the young people who died.
The lady in the white nightgown. The thing doesn’t end here. Because the ghostly woman, dressed in whitewhose figure proverbially appears on the curve leading to the old sanatorium, has been seen by motorcyclists and drivers for decades. several people interviewed for Misterios Conquenses They assure the same. It is not uncommon to find someone who has seen someone and confirms that yes, this folklore motif is repeated here more than anywhere else.
The photos of silhouettes difficult to explain taken by Carlos Torrijos, the lights in the sky recorded by witnesses and collected by TVE in 2004… until Iker Jiménez echoed and turned La Atalaya into the territory of reference of the La Mancha mystery.
Where does it come from? The theory says that she was a patient at the children’s psychiatric hospital who jumped out of a window, or that she was a girl kidnapped and murdered on the spot—there is no police record of this kidnapping. It even links to a previous appearance from 1939, weeks before the end of the Civil War, when several witnesses claimed to see a woman in white on successive nights who radiated her own light.
Demolition and end of the curse. In 2007, the building was officially condemned; unofficially, to “end evil.” The abandonment left structures in dangerous conditions. But even that didn’t quite work: months after the demolition, the burned body of the doorman of a nearby nightclub was found near the scene. And the legend immediately incorporated it into its story.
The pain comes from behind, as always. In the Manchego Studies Notebooks (#49) the prolonged inquisitorial persecution of witchcraft and witchcraft in the current province of Ciudad Real is documented, where cases of torture such as that of María de Lao are identified. Today the hill is a municipal forest park, with hiking trails, a children’s area and picnic areas. The Ciudad Real resident who goes out to play sports and the one who goes up at night looking for the lady’s curve coexist there, without much conflict.
Your own video game. Local studio Sonrisilla Games—formed by designer Marta Ruiz (‘Waxipola’) and developer Samuel Sanjuan (‘SamKnight’)—is finishing ‘Stories from the Watchtower – The Witcher‘, a graphic horror adventure set on the hill. The project was born after the developers event Guadalindiein Malaga. And, apparently, it has required a lot of journalistic work from its creators: collection of oral testimonies, comparison of real events and interviews with those who experienced the history of the sanatorium up close.
The game will be released in months and will mix the black chronicle of 1987, the myth of the witch of The Watchtower and the popular witchcraft documented in the area. Behind it there is terror, but also the vindication of the narrative potential of Ciudad Real made by local developers, in a region that does not even yet have a university degree in design. Arid hills, after all.
Images | Property of Emilio Martin Aguirre
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