The Buried Truth

When Albaret's town council approved the plans for the Zona Alta urbanisation in June 1987, the project was presented as a model of orderly development. The first properties were handed over in 1988. The last, in 1992. In between: a considerable volume of building permits, project amendments, and foundation adjustments that deserve closer examination.

Documents I have obtained from the Architects' Register and the municipal planning archive reveal something that does not add up. In at least one plot within the development, the specified depth of the swimming pool foundations was altered at an advanced stage of construction, with a handwritten note from the project engineer authorising the change. The official justification: adjustment for ground conditions.

An eighty-centimetre reduction in foundation depth is not unusual in construction. What is unusual is the timing. The amendment was signed weeks after the building inspector listed on the project file — whose name appears in the professional register records — ceased to appear in any official document connected to the development.

The developer behind Zona Alta was Albarque Desarrollos Inmobiliarios S.L. — a wholly fictional company created for the novel — founded and run at the time by Vicente Albarque, a fictional character. In 2006, a regional publication reported an administrative penalty against the company for irregularities in the disposal of construction waste. The penalty file is a matter of public record within the world of the novel.

I have sought comment from the company's successors and from the current head of the Albaret local police. No response has been received.

The investigation is ongoing. If you worked on the construction of Zona Alta or have knowledge of the events described, I ask you to get in touch.

I have spent five years covering planning corruption on the Costa Blanca. In that time I have learned that documents lie less than people, and that municipal archives hold more secrets than their archivists realise.

The property boom of the late eighties and early nineties transformed this stretch of coastline beyond recognition. Many of those developments were built properly, with their permits in order and their foundations where they should have been. But not all of them.

I have documented at least four planning files in which project amendments during construction — changes to foundation depth, alterations to plot boundaries, adjustments to layout — were authorised with a speed that does not correspond to the normal timelines of administrative procedure. In every case, the developer had direct connections to the relevant local authority.

This is not an accusation. It is what the documents say. And the documents are public record.

Building inspectors are the invisible guardians of construction. They sign. They verify. They certify. And sometimes, when what they see does not match what they are being asked to sign, they disappear. Not always voluntarily.

The file of Julián Ortega — a fictional character from the novel The Forgotten Corpse — is, within the world of the novel, one of those cases. A certified inspector with years of experience in the comarca, he ceased to appear in any public planning document from the spring of 1991 onwards. The official account: a voluntary move to Madrid for a new position. No colleague remembers saying goodbye.

There are things that the archive cannot tell you. For those, there is the novel.