Something is changing in the heart of Madrid’s bigwigs. While rental prices continue to rise dramatically, and house purchase prices are impossible for the mayor, what remains between the Government of Spain and the Government of Madrid is an agreement for a real estate operation that looks like a trick from the game of Monopoly. In your heart is the establishment of the Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism in front of the House of Representatives. To build it, the state needs to draw up several plans for the required building on Calle Duque de Medinaceli, overlooking the Palace Hotel, owned by the Community of Madrid. To achieve it, I propose a difficult deal, according to the documents that have arrived in the country: the payment of 1.7 million euros and the handing over to the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso of a villa of 300 square meters that will allow Madrid to complete the ownership of a palace on Calle Nuñez de Balboa. A pile of old rejects, a “harvest” of tourism in the capital of Spain.
“Being completely in agreement with the possibility of Madrid hosting a space dedicated to victims of terrorism, we can do no more than show our complete opposition to what the Interior Ministry is sowing from this place,” says Jorge Nacarino, President of the Regional Federation of Veterinary Associations (FRAVM). He continues, “The cities of the center insist that the cultural policies in the city, and the various ministries, are committed to the tourist places in the center, and do not allow the use of the equipment you need like in any other area.” “El barrio de las Letras doesn’t need another cultural container,” he says. “It needs social housing.” He concludes: “This building can be used for any type of social housing that prefers the elderly to live in the neighborhood, or young people, given the housing crisis that we are suffering from with the increased provision of valuables and the phenomenon of housing for tourist use.”
This does not seem to be the goal. The Interior Ministry’s project for the Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism is huge, and arises from the Victims of Terrorism Law of 2011. It includes all the terrorism that Spain has suffered since June 1960, ending the killing of the girl Begonia Uroz with a DRIL (Revolutionary Directorate Ibérico de Liberación Nacional) bomb in San Sebastian, today. As a result, it includes ETA terrorism, the Swiss War, Grabow and Judaism, without forgetting many ephemeral elements such as DRIL, anarchists and FRAP. The headquarters in Madrid will join the existing headquarters in Vitoria-Gasteiz.
To honor the victims and condemn terrorism, the central government aspires to allocate 4,000 square meters for exhibitions. Once the exchange with Madrid is completed, the chosen building, opened in 1922 as Palacio de Hielo y del Automóvil, will have an area of 15,000 square metres, with three distinct entrances. As a result, the next step will be for the farm, which depends on Patrimonio, to decide how to distribute the spaces and find a use for them that does not use the monument, a government spokesman explained.
How did you get here? There is a need to go back to several decrees issued in 1984 and 1989. “The state,” explains the spokesman for the central executive; “I gave up a lot of heritage so that the autonomous regions could set up their own workshops and they could start working when they started.” He added: “Among these pieces is part of the building located on Calle Duque de Medinaceli, which is now being restored.”
This completes the explanation of the process by the official spokesman for the regional government. “It is an exchange proposed by the central government in which we receive a plan (946 square meters) that we had for a building in which the rest of the laboratories were from the state, and vice versa: the central government hands over to us a plan (370 square meters) for a building in which the rest of the laboratories are ours,” details. He continues, saying: “The factory that we gave up has been idle since the start of the exchange process.” “In the property that will now be entirely ours, there is an abandoned part that was the international vaccination center, and now education is used to prepare gowns.”
Millionaire fees
For Madrid, which views the change as an “improvement on heritage”, the process is a small pill. The two parties agreed to pay attention to the good involved in the process. The value of the community was estimated at 3,593,956.69 euros. El del Estado, at 1886762.23. Since the community is more valuable, the state had to pay the difference: 1,707,194.46 euros, in addition to handing over a villa of 370 square meters that would allow the autonomous government to complete the ownership of a kind of palace located on Calle Nuñez de Balboa.
In 2022, the then presidential advisor, Enrique López, visited these facilities to announce the establishment of the Madrid Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism there. However, in November, Miguel Angel García Martín, spokesman for the autonomous government, announced that the Community of Madrid would inaugurate the Interactive Center of Memory in memory of victims of terrorism at Carrera de San Jerónimo 13, where the Office of the Viceroy for Justice and Victims is located.
What will happen next with the new acquisition signed in the past for health and judicial use? “The use it will be given is unspecified,” says a regional spokesman about a process between two rival political administrations who have only been able to reach an agreement over their real estate interests.