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Francisco Hernando personally supervised the works of the cemetery of Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), where he has been buried for a week. And it is that Paco el Pocero, as everyone knew the character, was fundamentally a builder since before he turned 20.
"He did not know how to draw, but he knew how to specify to the architects what he wanted. He was rigorous and involved in each work," his collaborators say.
So it would not be less with the pantheon where he would rest for all eternity. "I was going over there, to see if everything was okay. He said he was going to put air conditioning, piped music and a phone line 'to keep giving you ass ...'", he said at home with his particular way of doing jokes, as told to LOC by his son Francisco, the second of the four brothers and right hand of his father in family businesses.
This black humor from El Pocero, connects directly with the origins of the hunger and misery of his childhood in the Madrid neighborhood of Tetuán, in a postwar period where survival cost life. One of his five brothers, Eduardo, died of hunger at age 6, when Paco was little and the family lived in a shed, from which they were later evicted.
El Pocero said that his father "had never eaten a fucking steak in his life." So when he was rich, he liked having the table full of food because of that terrible lack of his childhood. For years, he refused to eat chicken, because once, as a child, a piece of chicken fell into a sewage well and, since there was nothing else, it had to be cleaned and eaten. "In the postwar period they ate cats, grandmother told us."
From Tetuán the family moved to Palomeras, in Vallecas , where there were no streets or water. The father raised a shack and over time, his son Paco made another one next to him to live with María Audena, his wife. She had come to Madrid from a town in Cuenca and made arrangements for Cortefiel as a seamstress, without pay and spending them purple.
"You had to go out to a kind of patio to make the most basic needs ," Francisco Jr. still remembers. "From there we went to a house in Santa Eugenia, the first normal house my parents had. When we got to the apartment, my father put us all in a bathtub, to take a bath with hot water. We were all crying, we hadn't seen nothing like it. "
El Pocero's father died when Paco was 18 years old and they were still very poor. Instead his mother was able to see her son's success : he died at 97 years old. Paco adored her. "He built two houses for her, one in Boadilla, near her son and grandchildren, and the other in the chalets they renovated in Seseña, with an elevator and everything," her grandson tells LOC.
THE SUCCESS
His great triumph as an entrepreneur was construction, and he rose to fame for the project to build 13,500 homes in a wasteland in Seseña, on the border between Toledo and Madrid. It was one of the largest private works in the History of Spain. Before, he had spent years building in Boadilla del Monte, Villaviciosa de Odón, Alcalá de Henares and Orcasitas, all of them in the province of Madrid.
Paco Hernando had started out as a construction worker, bringing water to the masons and sometimes they gave him something for the service. At the age of 16 he became a master pocero, making the galleries underground like miners, with picks and shovels, without masks, hardly any oxygen and in danger of collapse. Even on some occasion they had to remove him with the rope that was tied around his waist, half dead.
In the late 1970s, Hernando began earning money by working piece-time to demolish shacks. For the evicted people, the Ivima gave them a new house, but many destroyed them, they went elsewhere and they had to be rebuilt. That is where the former well-man began his fortune, making hundreds of houses working for the Administration.
Seseña was both a success and a nightmare. His lawsuits and confrontations with the communist mayor of the town, who denied him first-time licenses, complicated the water supply and access to the Andalusian highway, the A-4.
The planned 13,500 floors were finally left at 5,000. But there is still the statue that he made in tribute to his parents and the park with the name of his wife. Seseña is on the rise again, there are schools, a health center and even a small mortuary built by Hernando himself.
The Pocero, who has died at the age of 74, worked from bed to the end. The family says that he endured as much as he could with his usual energy and his will to live, until he was taken to the Quirón clinic, where he died last Friday.
In the spectacular mansion of the urbanization Las Lomas de Boadilla del Monte, where Paco and María Audena lived, dozens of messages were received, even from anonymous people who admired this difficult-to-label entrepreneur, with a story with more lights than shadows, fighter self-made, boasting that it owned the world's most luxurious and most expensive private jet , a Global Express XRS valued at € 45m, the same as Bill Gates' had .
And it was not the only aircraft he had. She got to have four more jets, with which she created a private flight rental company that Victoria Beckham used from time to time, when the Spice Girl lived in Madrid after the signing of her husband by Real Madrid. Hernando medicalized his at a very high cost to bring Rocío Jurado from Houston (USA), already touched to death, in a gesture of his legendary generosity.
A business that failed because it was not his thing, one more mistake, surely due to the desire for megalomania of someone who has lived and suffered extreme misery. As when exhibiting the most luxurious yacht in Spain, the Clarena II, 72 meters long, which ended up selling to an Argentine magnate for 58 million euros, when it suffered one of its strongest economic potholes (another of the yachts that had sold it to Juan Villar Mir for 30 million).
Francisco Hernando sank several times, but managed to get back up and move on. But two of the issues that most concerned him have died unsolved. A debt with the Treasury and Social Security, close to 93 million euros. And the demand that he filed with the government of Equatorial Guinea, where he had agreed with President Teodoro Obiang to lift large-scale works. An agreement that the president unilaterally broke when the project costs had already cost Hernando hundreds of millions of euros in material.
"Professionally demanding and severe and a piece of bread as a person." This was El Pocero, according to his son Francisco.
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