Posted by Few people may know it, but in Valencia there is a building everyone calls “la finca maldita”, the cursed building. It stands at number 1 Avenida Tres Forques, in the neighbourhood of the same name. It was built in the 1950s and, from 1968 to today, up to nine violent or unexplained deaths have been counted within its walls.
The “finca maldita” is an apartment block at 1 Avenida Tres Forques in Valencia, built in the 1950s. Since 1968 several people have died there in tragic or unclear circumstances: accidents, overdoses, a murder. For many it is just a chain of misfortunes, for others a cursed place.
A building born under an unlucky star
In post-war Valencia, as the city expanded, an anonymous residential block went up at number 1 Tres Forques. Its construction coincided with one of the worst tragedies in the city’s history: in October 1957, after days of torrential rain, the river Turia burst its banks and flooded the city, with an official death toll of 81.
For many that event was a sinister omen. And according to local accounts, the land on which the building stands is no ordinary land: victims of a 17th-century plague and a 19th-century cholera epidemic were supposedly buried there in a mass grave. The building itself has something unusual about it too: a staircase with a triangular plan reminiscent of a pyramid.
For eleven years, however, nothing strange happened at Tres Forques 1.
1968: the mystery of the showgirl Gracia Imperio
On 11 November 1968, in flat 78, costume designer José Luis Martínez found the lifeless bodies of the showgirl Gracia Imperio and her former partner, Antonio González. The gas was on and there were no signs of violence. Two lives cut short in what could have been a deliberate act, a domestic accident or a murder.
Gracia Imperio was no ordinary performer. She was a star of the theatres of Ruzafa, the district then nicknamed “Valencia’s Broadway”, and an icon of the city’s nightlife. That is precisely why her death caused such a stir. The investigation never managed to establish what really happened, and so the Tres Forques building entered Valencia’s crime pages.
The fall down the stairwell
Between the 1970s and 1980s came a new tragedy. The brother-in-law of Mercedes Viana, a nightlife businesswoman who owned the famous Mogambo Club and no fewer than 11 flats in the building, was found dead at the bottom of the stairwell. Here too it was never established whether it was an accident or something else.
A party that ended in tragedy
In the 1990s an 18-year-old was celebrating his birthday in his eighth-floor flat. His parents were out that evening. When they came home they found him dead, from an overdose caused by a mix of substances.
The two little siblings
This is perhaps the most heartbreaking chapter. Two siblings aged four and two, left alone for a few minutes, were playing on a bed in a fourth-floor room, near an open window. The little girl fell, and her brother, trying to catch her, fell too. She died instantly, he a few days later in hospital.
Some time later a man was found dead at home, after his mother, unable to reach him, raised the alarm.
2012: the murder of a Brazilian woman
On 1 March 2012 the building was the scene of its most brutal episode. A man living on the fifth floor, with a drug addiction, called a 32-year-old Brazilian sex worker. After drinking wine and taking cocaine, at the height of an argument, he attacked her with savage violence: he punched her repeatedly in the face, stabbed her several times and finally strangled her. Then, to get rid of the body, he dragged it to the stairwell and dropped it.
Neighbours, alarmed by the noise, called the police, and the man even tried to resist arrest. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The latest victim, for now
The latest victim, for now, is a man found dead in his flat on 11 March 2015. Neighbours had alerted the authorities because of the strong smell coming from it. The local press counted him as the eighth victim of the “finca maldita”.
From crime news to legend
Over time the “finca maldita” has become one of Valencia’s urban legends, on the border between true crime and the paranormal. In 2018 writer and journalist Carlos Aimeur drew on it for his novel Siniestro, which he himself describes as “absolutely fictional”: its protagonist is a journalist working on a TV programme about strange phenomena. The following year a self-published comic came out, Nueve horcas. Bajo la luna negra de Valencia, created by Pablo Vergel and drawn by Adrián Bago. The title plays on the street name, Tres Forques, “three gallows”, and on the number of victims: nine.
A building marked by misfortune
Tres Forques 1 remains a place where real tragedies blend with urban legends. So many deaths in a few decades seem too many to be mere coincidence, yet too few to prove a real curse, especially in a large block where a great many people have lived over the decades. Today the building is still inhabited by people who, unaware of the past or defying it, prefer to live without superstition.
The truth? Perhaps it lies somewhere in between: not a cursed building, but the unfortunate stage of human dramas that time has turned into myth.
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- Las Provincias – La octava víctima de la finca maldita (2015)
- Alicante Plaza – Carlos Aimeur turns the mystery of the finca maldita into a novel (2018)
- Alicante Plaza – Interview with Pablo Vergel (2019)
- Wikipedia – 1957 Valencia flood
