It was day 48 of her new life. Four years of hardship had passed for Cristina P. Martín to finally move into her own flat, a significant achievement for any young couple in Madrid. It was early morning, and she was having dinner in the living room, leftovers from lunch, after returning from her partner’s concert – a punk singer who was resting in the bedroom. Suddenly, the living room lit up. Through the balcony, the powerful beam of a police searchlight entered. She peered out and saw several police cars in the narrow Carabanchel street. Through a megaphone, an officer shouted: “Madam! We have an intrusion alert! Come down now!”
A Nightmarish Encounter in Pajamas
Dressed in pajamas, slippers, and a grey robe adorned with sushi roll patterns, she immediately exited her flat, ready to explain that they must have made a mistake. She thought the confusion was understandable, as the entity from which they bought the property, Sareb, also known as “the bad bank,” had not yet removed the alarms from the common areas or the anti-squatter door from the building entrance, despite them having informed Sareb in writing that they had moved in, being the first to inhabit that block of flats. At three in the morning of that cold Sunday, January 18th, she walked down the stairs with her mobile phone, where she kept the deeds. That should be enough, she believed. She was very wrong.
Cristina P. Martín, 35, works as a pre-sales engineer for a software company and narrates this story between calls from clients she attends to in English. She sits by the living room table where she was having dinner when that powerful light invaded their home. The parquet floor is visible, and there is barely room for another book on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. Above a sofa, they have placed a framed poster of the punk band Eskorbuto, a reference in Basque radical rock from the eighties and nineties.
She had found this flat on Idealista in the summer of 2024, after two years of searching. The entire building was one of those housing blocks left unfinished after the bursting of the real estate bubble and absorbed by Sareb, the entity created to sell the problematic assets of banks. It is a second-floor flat with a storage room and garage that cost her just over 265,000 euros, which she is paying with a mortgage. Cristina left the flat she was renting with the aspiration of moving into this one with her boyfriend, but Sareb informed her and the other buyers that there was a problem with the electricity due to a delay in the permit for the installation that powers the building. They had to wait.
The Struggle for a Home and a Nightmare Arrest
She explains that they didn’t know if it would be a delay of months or years and that it was very difficult to get answers from Sareb or the real estate agency that marketed the flats, Hipoges. The wait was hurting their finances, so they decided to move in. They searched ChatGPT for how to power a flat and found that for 600 euros, a battery could provide them with light for a week, which they could recharge at a nearby music studio. They moved into their home on December 1st.
Cristina claims that early on January 18th, she encountered National Police officers who had no intention of dialoguing. “I went out in my pajamas to explain that they could leave in peace,” she recalls. “But they wouldn’t let me speak and kept shouting at me. An officer screamed in my face, and I told her not to talk to me like that. Then she grabbed my phone and slammed me against the wall to handcuff me,” says the young woman, who is 1.57 meters tall and weighs 50 kilograms. Her partner came down, alerted, and began recording with his mobile, according to Cristina, but another police officer immobilized him and threw him to the ground. “He whispered in his ear, ‘I’m going to smash you, you son of a bitch,'” she recounts. They were each taken in a different car. According to Cristina’s narration, her partner’s handcuffs were too tight, and he ended up with bleeding wrists. “They were swerving like a fairground ride to make him hit himself,” she continues. “He shouted at them, ‘You’re wrong, we’re the owners,’ but they laughed like psychopaths,” Cristina assures. In the car where she was transported, she says, the two officers listened to techno music.
They were taken to the Carabanchel police station, each to a different cell. There, they realized that Cristina needed her medication. It was her boyfriend who returned to the flat, escorted by two officers. He blew out a candle that had been left lit and fed Pistón, their podenco dog. “Seeing the furnished house, they realized their mistake. That we hadn’t just broken in that night and that we lived there. For whatever reason, they took off his handcuffs, asked if he played the guitar, and petted the dog.” It didn’t matter.
A Judge’s Disbelief and a Taste of Injustice
Cristina found out in the cell that they were not being accused of property usurpation, what is known as squatting. They were kept arrested for disobedience and aggression, an accusation they claim is fabricated. She remembered a friend who had an altercation with the police years ago. She thought that, like him, they would go through a trial and end up with a criminal record.
Distraught, she apologized to her boyfriend, who heard her from another cell. Perhaps nothing would have happened if she had stayed on the balcony. As she usually does, she started singing to calm down. A drunk woman, arrested for assaulting her 16-year-old son, watched her.
Shortly after dawn, they were transported in a “lechera” (police van) with other detainees to the Moratalaz police station for photos and fingerprints, and from there to the Plaza de Castilla courts, where they were again locked up separately. She was in a cell with three pickpockets, three girls arrested in a nightclub brawl, another involved in a fight, a flight attendant who had tried to stab her partner, and a 19-year-old nursing student accused of stealing a car. She knows what each one did because to pass the time, they talked about their respective calamities. But much of the time she spent in silence, staring into space. The white electric light “drove her crazy,” she was freezing, and they didn’t give her blankets, she recounts. The detainees had to relieve themselves in front of everyone in a toilet in the same cell, next to a wall stained with excrement. On the door, it read: “Fucking Police.”
She says that a little after three in the afternoon, after twelve hours of torment, she was called to meet privately with her public defender. She brought good news. They were released without charges. The duty judge had not believed the police testimony, she was told. None of what she had feared would come true. No trial, no money for lawyers, no criminal record. Cristina burst into tears.
Aftermath: Apologies, Lawsuits, and Lingering Trauma
That Sunday afternoon, they emerged into daylight, she in pajamas and he in a tracksuit. They called a taxi to return to Carabanchel with the idea of reuniting with poor Pistón, eating, and resting. But upon getting out of the vehicle, they discovered that the portal key didn’t work. Sareb had changed the anti-squatter door. Although they didn’t feel like it at all, they called the police. This time, they helped them. An employee of the alarm company arrived and told them he couldn’t give them the keys because that depended on Sareb, but he could give them access to rescue Pistón. That night, they went to a friend’s house who gave them shelter.
On Wednesday at noon, three and a half days after the fateful dawn, Sareb handed them the new key. Now they are preparing a lawsuit against Sareb for moral damages. They rule out acting against the police “because they have a presumption of veracity, and it is very difficult to win against them,” explains their lawyer, Nacho Pérez-Santander, present during the conversation with Cristina.
Sareb has not apologized to them, but after being consulted by this newspaper, a spokesperson sent an email for the article: “We regret what happened to this couple due to the situation experienced after this police action that occurred due to the alarm going off in the building when they tried to access their home.”
The spokesperson acknowledges their “mistake” for having marketed these homes without electricity supply. The entity assures that it offered alternatives to buyers, such as terminating the contract or covering a rental. Cristina replies that she rejected the latter option because she distrusted Sareb’s timely payment, given their delays in responding. Sareb also defends that despite the delay in providing the new keys, the portal was left open on Monday. It adds that it is processing the electricity problem, but the management may take a few months.
Regarding the Police, sources from the force in Madrid maintain the veracity of what was stated in the report by their intervening colleagues. They specify that by protocol, they do not give credibility to photos on a mobile phone of official documents, such as deeds. They add that there were “forced locks on two flats” in the block, which they interpreted as signs of intrusion.
Cristina insists that the officers did not ask if she had the original deeds. She thinks they were carried away by their prejudices. Her “Bildu-style” fringe, her crescent moon and Star of David tattoo on her hand, the same one Camarón de la Isla wore, her boyfriend’s “Euskal Herría rings” and long hair… “Maybe if I wore a bracelet with the Spanish flag, what happened to me wouldn’t have happened,” she says, recalling the incident.
Her lawyer nods: “Certainly. For a long time, I have advised my clients to dress well when seeing the judge.”
Cristina believes this would not have happened without the help of advertising and news that have given an “exaggerated idea” of the squatting problem. In fact, the day before her meeting with EL PAÍS, the police, in this case, the municipal police, appeared again, apparently alerted by a neighbor. This time there were no arrests. “There is too much psychosis,” says this new owner about the story she has starred in in the Madrid of real estate nightmares.
Source: https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2026-03-04/48-dias-disfrutando-de-tu-nuevo-piso-la-policia-te-confunde-con-una-okupa-y-duermes-en-el-calabozo.html
