The Torture Chamber that wasn't

What was that strange place, we wondered, each time we passed it in our walks through the local woods?

One of the gates. With a Levantina car parked inside it

A high wall surrounded the whole plot of land. It was pierced in two places by tall wrought-iron gates, decorated with representations of fruit or leaves, and in one case, topped by an impressive coat of arms. The iron was rusty, though, and the grounds were overgrown. There was just one building inside and, despite its fearsome defences, with close-mesh bars at all the windows, and the high mast of aerials and satellite dishes at the top, it looked distinctly uninhabited.

Inside one of the gates, adorned with a sign proclaiming that the place was protected by Levantina security company, stood several cars from that company.

My first thought was that it was the estate of some minor noble of earlier times, now abandoned and left to go to rack and ruin.

“Old nobility?” scoffed Danielle. “The gates are set in simple cement-block gateposts. Whoever spent a fortune on the gates spent nothing on the frame he mounted them in. And it certainly isn’t old.”

Danielle inspecting the estate through the main gate
Note the heraldic decorations. And the concrete gateposts
You can just see Toffee on her back legs, also looking inside
Meanwhile Luci’s wondering why they’re bothering

I had to admit she was right. There was nothing ancient, venerable or even aristocratic in the plain concrete pillars on either side of the gate. How could I have been so naïve? After all, even the one building we could see was just a concrete blockhouse. Too big to be a gatehouse, and not close to a gate anyway, it was far too small and unsightly to be some kind of baronial hall.

The blockhouse. Note the aerial and satellite dishes
And the wire

The most striking feature of the place was its security. The wall came with an iron-bar fence, and further in, there was the line of barbed wire. I’ve already said that the building looked like a blockhouse, dour, featureless, undecorated.

But there were no watch towers, no guards, no manicured parade ground. So not a prison camp or anything like that. Going past with a group of friends, we debated other possibilities.

Could it be a drug lord’s highly secure location for storing his product? It’s true that it looks too much the part, but might that not be brilliantly devious double-camouflage? Make it look too much like a drug lord’s hideaway, and no policeman would ever suspect that it could be one.

“Too obvious,” they’d all say, and go and look somewhere else.

That didn’t feel too plausible. I preferred the theory that it was a top-secret site operated by the Spanish intelligence service. Underneath that apparently uninhabited blockhouse, there were deep basements equipped with sophisticated torture devices where, even as we spoke, orange-suited prisoners suspected of criminal subversion were screaming out their confessions to crimes of which they were entirely innocent.

That seemed possible until we considered that any self-respecting Spanish spook would want to be based in Madrid. The woods of La Vallesa somewhere outside Valencia? Much too far from the metropolitan delights that make life bearable to the senior servants of the Spanish state.

The mystery all ended the day we turned up and found a Levantina car outside the gates, with its driver at the wheel. He was pleasant, polite and friendly.

“The place belonged to some guy who was crazy about security,” he explained, “and his son, who inherited it, can’t sell it. It suits us, though, as a place to keep our cars. So we rent it as a car park.”

A Levantina Seguridad car

A security guards’ car park? What a let-down.

No minor noble entertaining his superiors to lavish dinners in the hope of an appointment further up the aristocratic ladder.

No drug lord bawling out an indolent underling who has yet again failed to liquidate an upstart competitor on a Valencia street corner.

No sadistic inquisitor pointing out that the electric dial setting has to be kept below five if his powerless victim’s survival is to be guaranteed, and then cackling insanely as he turns it up to six.

Just a car park.

“The mystery’s gone,” Danielle pointed out to me as we walked past recently. She was right. It had. Fortunately, the beauty of the woods around are more than enough to compensate.

Otherwise, how would I cope with the loss of my fantasies?