"Except for a few, no one thought this would end the way it did." Manolo, a resident of Burguillos, says it, and in that sentence everything fits: there are towns that are ruined slowly and towns that are ruined suddenly, with an idea. Burguillos, twenty kilometers from Seville, at the beginning of the Sierra Norte, was to stop being a small municipality and become a dormitory city of the capital. And for that, a four-star hotel was needed, see the irony.
It was called La Alquería. Eight thousand square meters built, 64 rooms, a swimming pool, a luxury restaurant and its own hospitality school, in a municipality that in the year 2000 had 3,514 registered residents and not a single obvious reason for anyone to sleep there. The City Council paid for it with public money in 2009 for about 14.5 million.
Manolo has lived it all from within. "It was clear that it was not normal for a town of just over 3,000 inhabitants to double overnight. The first thing is that there was no infrastructure to provide good service to the entire population that was intended to be attracted."
At the head of the City Council that projected these plans was José Juan López, socialist mayor between 1995 and 2011, and at his side the key piece of the entire history: the municipal company Burguillos Natural. Almost twenty years later, everything that the town still owes depends on that company. Today there are 27 million euros recognized by a final judgment and in the hands of KSAC Europe Investments, an American fund that demands every last cent. Burguillos has already paid 4.2 million. More than twenty-three are missing, with a municipal budget that does not reach 5.4 million a year.
The catalog of those pharaonic constructions still stands, in different degrees of abandonment: a macro discotheque with capacity for 8,000 people - more than what the entire census then totaled -, an Olympic covered swimming pool that is now invaded by pigeons, a theatre, an underground car park with 600 spaces... In total, some 40 million euros wasted on different projects of dubious usefulness.
"Another separate issue is the major works undertaken by the City Council and the municipal company Burguillos Natural; regarding the latter, everyone agrees that it is the cause of most of the debt," explains Manolo. "Here the eagles on duty came to put their claws and squeeze the town, always with the permission and consensus of the City Council at that time. Apparently, they wanted to make Burguillos a great city, but when everything exploded, and not only here, only a desolate town was left full of debts."
IT CAME TO WORK
Of all that tourist complex, La Alquería was the only one that really worked. It opened, it provided employment, it served breakfast. Then it closed and stayed there, with its four stars and its 64 empty rooms that now from the outside can be seen boarded up with brick and concrete.
It was inaugurated in 2002 and closed in 2009 after the declaration of bankruptcy by the municipal company Burguillos Natural. The closure of the symbol of Burguillo's economic waste led to a situation that the council continues to endure to this day. As a witness to the disaster, its letters are erased, its windows boarded up.
"There are plenty of stories to keep you awake," the neighbor concludes. "There were cases of recently completed works that were demolished and rebuilt only because an even more pharaonic idea arose. In the end, the vast majority of these projects were never completed. It was, in short, an absolute disaster for the municipality."
The City Council, governed since 2019 by the popular Domingo Delgado, is paying the debt little by little. The fund has demanded that the council request a loan of 28 million euros and this August it has even asked the Andalusian Government to consider the dissolution of the City Council. The mayor responds that this credit would mean added fees of 2.8 million a year for twelve years: de facto closing the town. "A stone has fallen on the current City Council, and a big one," says Manolo. "They cannot do more than what they do, and the work they are doing to keep the town moving forward, paying the debt little by little, is undeniable. They are doing everything in their power given the circumstances."
