The Secret Of Asunta Basterra

The bench is unremarkable. The slats have an unevenness. The lowest one droops at an end, another rises and reveals a gap with the one beneath it. The bench hasn't been well-made and it hasn't been well-maintained. What colour is this bench? It's hard to say. The photo is a bluey-grey. The bench might be brown, might be green. Where is this bench? It is in a park in Santiago de Compostela, the Galician city with the shrine to Saint James, one of the Twelve Apostles, and to which Catholics - more than 100,000 of them a year - make a pilgrimage.

But this is not a story about Santiago. It is a story about a bench. Who is sitting on the bench? An eleven-year-old girl. She is wearing slip-ons and appears to have no socks. She has a fleece cardigan with at least three buttons which are buttoned-up. She is looking straight at the camera. The girl is alone but she is not sitting in the middle of the bench. She is to one end, the end where the lowest slat droops. There is space to her left. Space for at least two more people. Two adults. There is a caption under the photo of this bench. It reads: "John's spirit haunts the Alameda".

The Alameda is the park. There is a story about this park. It's only short and it was written in September last year. "Once upon a time there was a happy family: a man, a woman and a son. One day the woman was assassinated. The man had to take retaliation on the person who killed his wife (Anna) but he died as well, because he tried to take retaliation but the bad man killed John, the husband. His body is in the Alameda park and his spirit too. He hopes his wife's spirit will come to him. Every day he sits on the benches."

There is another photo. It is of the same girl. The sun is shining, she is wearing a vest and a pair of shorts. She seems happy. There is a caption to this photo, too. It reads: "Boss of the ghost hunters".

The girl was Asunta Basterra. Last Sunday her body was found on a forest path in Teo, a town to the south of Santiago. Her parents have been arrested and been placed in custody, suspected of either Asunta's murder or manslaughter.

In January last year, Asunta's maternal grandmother died at the family home. In July last year, her maternal grandfather also died. No autopsy was carried out on either. They were both cremated.

Also in July, Asunta posted an introduction to a blog. That is where we can see the photo of her on the bench and the photo of her with her arms folded announcing that she is in charge of the ghost hunters. On 3 September last year she entered a second post. This is the one with the short story. There are no other posts on the blog.

The Guardia Civil believe that there was an issue with the grandparents' inheritance. They also believe that Asunta knew about this; that she knew a secret about her family and about her parents. They also think that Asunta's blog may have something to tell about this secret.

It is of course quite possible that the blog was no more than the product of an imaginative mind. It is in English (some of which I have corrected above) and it says that the blog was being written about "strange sightings" seen in three parks in Santiago. But it wasn't apparently only the work of Asunta. It says that the story of the parks will be told by Asunta Basterra Porto and Sophie Elizabeth Paton. Sophie, it would seem, was an English teacher at an academy in Santiago.

If the blog does say anything that might interest the police, then Sophie is the only person who might be able to shed any light. Alternatively, there may be nothing at all to shed any light on. It may also be that Sophie didn't really have anything to do with the blog, or if she did and she ceased to be a teacher at the academy, this may explain why there were no more entries after 3 September 2012.

The murder (or manslaughter) of Asunta has caused a sensation. It would have done anyway, but the sensation has been heightened because of Asunta's blog. It has been suggested that the girl may, in addition to knowing the family secret, have had some premonition of her grandfather's death and even her own. The photo of her on the bench, now one knows the background, can take on a whole eery meaning. Or it may mean nothing.

But there is another factor, one that may have led Asunta to think that her life was in danger. Two teachers at her school had reported that she was coming to school in a state of sedation. An explanation for this was that she was taking anti-histamines, but now another explanation is being sought.

"John's spirit haunts the Alameda." The photo of the girl on the bench was posted on 18 July 2012. Eight days later, her grandfather was dead.


(Note: There is some criticism of the blog still being available, but it isn't voyeuristic. I don't think it unreasonable to still be able to view it - http://asunca.wordpress.com/author/asunca/)

Gone Missing: Santiago's City of Culture

Santiago de Compostela is one of Spain's grand cities. It was designated as a World Heritage Site many years before UNESCO had ever even heard of Mallorca's Tramuntana mountains. It is the destination for 100,000 pilgrims who visit the shrine of Saint James, Spain's patron saint, whose remains are supposedly in the shrine. A city with centuries of history, culture and fine architecture, a decision was taken in 2001 to bring that architecture a bit more up to date. A project to build a "city of culture" was embarked upon. Twelve years and almost 300 million euros later, there are two ruddy great holes in the ground, and two of six buildings originally conceived as comprising this "city" are missing. They are going to stay missing, while the holes may well remain holes. The plug has been pulled on the project.

Before one gets all self-righteous about this being yet another example of a profligate vanity project in the name of a Spanish regional government, which it is, there is a distinct whiff of a dome about it all. When the first two of the six, now only four buildings were opened in 2011, so a mere ten years after work had started, it would seem that no one knew what to put in them. As it is, they have become a library and an archive, which should both get the pulses racing of tourists. Two more have since also opened, one of them the building that houses the services to run the damn project. What were going to be an arts centre and a theatre are not now going to be either, as they won't be built.

The city of culture, a title that is an affront to what genuinely is a city of culture, Santiago that is, was a project dreamt up by Manuel Fraga. Remember him? You should do. He was Franco's tourism minister.

Fraga was president of Galicia from 1990 to 2005. The city of culture was to have been one of his great legacies to the region. It was, though, a legacy conceived partly out of jealousy of what the Basques had achieved with the building of the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Galicia wasn't going to be outdone. It has been and it has been left with considerable egg on its face. Far from creating a project to show off Galicia to the world and to be one of great prestige, the region has been made to look something of a laughing-stock. At least some of the other grand vanity projects that cost absolute fortunes, such as Valencia's fabulous City of Arts and Sciences, have actually been finished, though this does of course bring us to the small matter of a project in Palma that hasn't been finished either. Perhaps they could demolish the Palacio de Congresos after all, ship the wreckage to Santiago and use it to fill in the two enormous holes in the ground where holes shouldn't be.

The decision to definitively and once for all put the remaining part of the project out of its misery has been taken by the now president of Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Being Galician, it is small surprise that he is seen as a potential successor to fellow Galician Rajoy; there's nothing like having a regional dynasty to run a political party. But Feijóo, who might have been expecting only nods of approval because of the decision to ditch the cultural city, finds that there are nods of disapproval because of an apparently unrelated matter. Photographs of him on the yacht of a convicted drug trafficker that were taken in the 1990s have suddenly come into the public domain. Feijóo has known of their existence for years, as have members of the PP hierarchy, including Rajoy. Calls have been made for him to resign, but he says he won't, as he hasn't done anything wrong. He may have been less than assiduous in checking the background of Marcel Dorado, said to be a central figure in a Galician smuggling mafia and currently in nick, but there isn't any reason to believe that he has done anything wrong. Or that he needs to resign.

Feijóo has made an ambiguous statement about attempts to intimidate him. There is a good question to be asked about why the photos have come out now. What does he mean by intimidation? Who is he referring to? Perhaps there is some link to the city of culture after all. Who knows. But there is a definite feel of something fishy in Galicia, of something that's missing, and it isn't just two buildings at Santiago's city of culture.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.