THE PALACETE OF THE
THREE NAMES

province of Guadalajara · 6 hours inside · 13 photos (number 13 came out... wrong) · ENTRY INCOMPLETE

I had been chasing this place for two years. A palacete built in 1899 that appears in the land registry under three different names depending on the decade: Villa Casilda, Instituto Helios, and from 1977 onwards… nothing. Literally: the plot is filed as "no use". A three-storey building with a tower, in the middle of a holm-oak estate, and as far as Spanish paperwork is concerned it has not existed for fifty years.

Two of us went: el Rubio with the drone and me with the usual camera. The drone died four minutes in — battery from 90 to 3, gone — so what you get is what my eyes saw and my usual 13 shots.

Inside, what you would expect from a place like this: fallen plaster, a grand staircase that creaks in C minor, graffiti from the 2000s in the kitchen. And then, the library. And this is where I need you to read slowly.

The bookcase

The library is looted like all of them: empty shelves, trampled books. All of them except one walnut bookcase, full and ordered, without a speck of dust. In a building where even the cobwebs have cobwebs. El Rubio made the horror-movie joke and pulled the one book with its spine turned inwards.

Nobody laughed, because the bookcase turned. Silent. Greased. A greased bookcase in a palacete that has not existed since 1977.

Behind it: a concrete staircase going down. With light. Fluorescents humming, in a building with no electrical supply since Franco. We went down 44 steps (I counted them, it is what I do when I do not want to think) and at the bottom it was no longer a palacete. It was something else. Clean walls, raised technical flooring, a long corridor with metal doors along both sides.

And at the end of the corridor, this:

A new elevator. Gleaming. Call light glowing amber. On the frame of the bookcase, right at the top, someone had scratched four digits: 0313. And on the metal doors of the corridor, one symbol kept repeating — a symbol I have not found in any industrial catalogue: ▚

On the last door before the elevator there was a sign. I photographed it — that was photo 12 — and it said a single word. I write it exactly as it was and I will not comment on it: DIMENSIAN. With that A. Look it up yourselves, because I cannot find a single registered company under that name. Not one.

Photo 13

I took it inside the corridor, framing the elevator. On the camera screen it looked fine. When I copied it to the computer, this came out:

Right after I took it, the elevator light went from amber to green. As if someone had called it from below. I am not ashamed to say it: we ran. We climbed the 44 steps in less time than it takes me to type this sentence, and the bookcase…

[ the entry cuts off here. i am sorry. it continues in the updates — J. ]