Almudena de Arteaga, Duchess of Infantado and writer of historical novelsis making headlines for a controversy on the children’s park, Duque del Infantado, which had been located for years at the foot of the castle of Manzanares el Real – known as the Mendoza castle – and which has now been moved. The aristocratic es owner of the emblematic castle of the town of Madridoand the land on which the slides of the playground were located was ceded by his grandfather and then his father, until 2015, to the aforementioned municipality and after years of fighting in the courts with the city council, has managed to get the property back; which has provoked protests from residents.
© Gtresonline
The conflict arose when the transfer of land expired in 2015 after having been extended several times. The Duchess took the case to court to recover the property that was being ““illegally occupied by the City Council”according to her own statement. From Arteaga, who is a famous writerknown for works such as Leonor. Has a queen been born? The Princess of Eboli, Eugenia de Montijoo The Beltranejaamong others, has spoken out after the controversy that has arisen from the disappearance of the children’s park that occupied that space, due to not having reached an economic agreement with the city council. The court, provisionally, decided to first set the value of the property at 1,200,000 euros. The duchess, an expert in noble law and writer of historical novels, had valued the plot at 2,237,275.05 euros. And the City Council, through the appraiser Uve Valoraciones e informes técnico municipales, valued it at 155,513.73 euros, considering it a “public green area”. Thus, the city council has not been able to meet the expense of 7,000 euros of rent that the aristocrat asked for this space of almost 3,000 square meters, so the park has been demolished and closed to the public. After the judicial resolution, the city council has moved the children’s games to a nearby plot, where a parking lot was previously located.
© Gtresonline
The Duchess’s Version
The ruling that returned the land to Almudena de Arteaga dates back to June, but the mayor of Manzanares El Real, José Luis Labrador, asked her to make the park available to residents during this summer and she accepted. The Duchess of Infantado, Almudena de Arteaga, wrote a letter to the director of The Country to give her version of what happened, where she explained that the land where the slides were located was first donated by her grandfather and then by her father, and that “it has been illegally occupied by the City Council for 10 years, as I myself have allowed and as declared by a court ruling. “Being grateful is a sign of good breeding, as the saying goes.”
The writer also assures that since she inherited it she has paid all the taxes and has tried to reach a solution with the City Council “so that they buy it, rent it at a fair price or evict it as it is private property.” Then, the aristocrat continues explaining: “To do this I requested an appraisal… as requested by their mayor, but they did not agree with it and commissioned their own. They wanted to expropriate it from me and they did not agree with the price of the appraisal court either. Now they have bought a plot of land in a worse location in the town and with the same urban planning classification for much more than I asked them for mine.”
© Gtresonline © GtresonlineThe castle of Manzanares el Real
Protests by residents, including journalist Mercedes Milá
Many neighbours have taken to the streets to protest against the change of location of the only park where the youngest children of the Madrid population played. Among them, a well-known face such as the journalist and presenter Mercedes Milá, also a resident of the town, published a message through her social networks positioning herself against the eviction: “Is it so difficult for a family like the Infantados to give up a little piece of land? If their father could speak from his grave, the dispute would disappear like a shooting star.”
