A woman was left homeless for more than two years after letting a friend of a friend stay in her property – only for them to end up squatting it.
Ana Flor claims she let the man stay in her apartment in Bermeo, in the Basque Country, while she went away on holiday, having been told he just needed few days to get back on his feet.
However, when she returned from her trip, she found the locks had been changed and she suddenly realised the property was being squatted.
She tried to take the squatters to court but the case was pushed back twice over two years.
Ana, fed up, then began camping in her beach chair outside the building on a daily basis.
She told Spanish news broadcaster Telecinco that she had only tried to a favour for her friend, from Morocco.
He had asked Ana if his friend could stay in the home for a few days because he had just got a job in the area.
Ana said: ‘I agreed and gave them the key. I asked them to make a copy so they could give it to me, and I never got it no matter how many times I asked them for it over the phone.
‘When I asked them to return the key, which had been stolen, they decided to go to the police, claiming that I had signed a rental agreement and changed the locks, and that I couldn’t enter their house.’
Since then, Ana has had to sleep at her relatives’ house or at her ex-husband’s home with her children.
In an update on Tuesday, an anti-squatter organisation reported that Ana had been able to return to the home.
It said the squatters left in the middle of the night after days of media attention and pressure from Ana and her supporters.
While Spain has launched new laws to make it easier to kick out squatters within a much shorter time frame, these only apply to those who have broken into homes to seize them.
The law does not cover those who have a rental contract and stop paying.
Knowing this, some squatters are claiming that they did have a rental contract, in a bid to delay the court process – among a myriad of other techniques that are shared among the gangs.
