There are families who never change their address or phone for fear that the missing person will return and will not find them at home or call the number they have memorized and no one will answer them.
The parents of the boy
Germán Quintana Blanco
, however, the pain made them put land in the middle.
Exactly 1,009 kilometers, the distance by road between Oviedo and the city of Fuengirola (Malaga), where they moved in 1988, a year after their 13-year-old son got lost during a school trip to the Picos de Europa.
-My parents sold everything they had in Oviedo [a restaurant and the apartment] to get away from there. They
have never returned to
the
Picos de Europa
and my father did not even want to return to Asturias. There were several years in which they cut off contact completely.
Cristina Quintana
, 40 years old today, Germán's little sister, serves us on the terrace of a fifth floor from which you can almost see the Boliches beach in
Fuengirola
. It is the house where his mother,
María Lourdes
, lives
. She has purposely absent herself during the interview - "this topic affects her a lot, it is very painful for her to remember it" - and awaits our march in a nearby park with Cristina's daughters, aged six and three. "Last night he didn't sleep thinking you were coming. 'I should have told them no, so I said yes,' he said this morning."
It was fortunate that the mother approved the talk with her daughter and also that she was in Spain.
She usually resides in
Kuala Lumpur
(Malaysia), where she works as a Translation Professor at the University.
After a year and a half without being able to leave the country due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it has only been 15 days since it arrived in Fuengirola.
She is six months pregnant and with the intention of giving birth here to her third child, since she has not wanted to know the sex of the baby.
The family has not spoken to the media for years.
-It is not that hope is lost, but we have had so many interviews and then they are not worth anything ... I really do it now to pay a small tribute to my brother, to convey that we have not forgotten him and that for us he is important .
The Quintana Blanco were in mid-1987 the living portrait of the prototypical happy family.
The father,
José Arturo
, had returned to his native Asturias after emigrating in Argentina for 14 years and had married a countrywoman from Ouria, María Lourdes.
The couple set up a restaurant in Oviedo - she in the kitchen;
he attending to the clientele- and he had the couple: Germán (13 years old) and Cristina (6).
In this idyllic picture, the late Germán is missing today and also the father, José Arturo Quintana, who died four years ago from cancer.
German, prepared to go camping, a year before.
Cristina, who was only six years old, hardly finds memories when she dives into her memory of that time. "They mix with the stories they have told me. [He closes his eyes and concentrates] I have in my head images of the floor, of some diffuse family scene ... I have memories of the suffering of those days and those after. family members because I was very young and they tried to protect me. My parents traveled a lot, they were going to and from Cangas de Onís all day [to the Civil Guard barracks] ".
On
June 7, 1987
was a
Sunday. The Quintana Blanco lived in front of
the Loyola school
in Oviedo, from where the excursion to the lakes of Covadonga started. Some children were accompanied by relatives and others, like Germán, went alone with an authorization signed by their parents. José Arturo and María Lourdes left the boy on the foot of the bus and went to the restaurant without suspecting that it would be the last day the store would open.
At one point during the expedition, a group proposed to go up to the
Mirador de Ordiales
, a natural balcony with impressive views of the Angón Valley. The chronicles of the time do not make it clear if Germán signed up at the last moment and started the ascent already behind schedule or if he got off the hook once it started. The testimony of a mountaineer who claimed to have seen him sitting under a tree, calm, probably resting, does seem reliable.
When the group that had undertaken the ascent returned to the starting point, a count was made. A child was missing. Those responsible for the excursion noticed Germán's absence at around 2:30 p.m., at the same time that a sudden storm was unleashing in the mountains. The spring day suddenly turned winter. The rain was joined by a thick fog that made visibility difficult and the thermometer dropped from 20 degrees and a peak to zero. Germán was only wearing a T-shirt, a thin sweater, and a towel;
no food
. He was searched all night with whistles and dogs despite the storm, which raged very hard on the Cantabrian coast the following days, causing the sinking of several boats and another disappeared off the coast of Vizcaya.
It was also the dense fog that was responsible for transforming the tragedy of the minor's disappearance into an even greater one. The search was joined by a helicopter and the Ertzaina Rescue Dog Group, the only canine search team that existed in Spain at the time. On the fifth day of the raid, at around 3.30 p.m., the weather conditions made it impossible to continue and the eight members of the group decided who was returning to Cangas de Onís in the
helicopter.
and who had a tedious ride in the car.
As soon as it took off, the plane crashed.
Seven people were traveling in it - the four canine guides who had won the draw, the pilot, the mechanic and the technical manager of Civil Protection of Asturias - and the four rescue dogs.
They all died on the spot.
Among them was Lourdes Verdes, mother of presenter
Anne Igartiburu
, who was 18 years old at the time.
-The accident added even more pain.
We are not directly responsible for the deaths of these people, but of course we would have liked to avoid it, ”says Cristina without delving much into the unfortunate event.
On June 23, 1987, two weeks after the disappearance,
Abc
collected these statements from Germán's mother.
"Alive we will no longer find him, we have no hope left, but I only ask that the corpse of my son appear."
Lourdes Blanco, the newspaper said, had lost
10 kilos in 14 days
.
Cristina in a park near the family home in Fuengirola.
The media did a continuous but discreet follow-up of the case.
At the time, only the two public television networks existed and the program
Who knows where
had not even been created
.
"It scares me to think that this would have happened today with the current media, which I think are brutal and hurt families," says Cristina, very critical of the media treatment of the disappearances.
“When the case of
Anna and Olivia
[the girls from Tenerife] came up, we turned off the television.
The media have turned a case of disappearance into a soap opera ».
In those statements of 1987, the mother did not contemplate that her son would live, but three decades later, the family, or at least Cristina, no longer speaks so emphatically about Germán's fate.
- The logical thing is to think that he had an accident, he stayed there and we have not found the body.
But since there is no proof that confirms this theory, since not a rest was found, neither the backpack nor anything ... When the body does not appear and there are no clues or trace, you have to shuffle other possibilities, as if it is not there .
If the logic is not confirmed, any idea that makes you think that it is alive somewhere you believe it.
His parents believed, or at least listened, to those who approached them with the story that David had not died, mostly psychics and detectives.
-They spent a lot of money on thousands of theories: kidnappings, people who had seen him alive taking care of a flock, religious sects ... My parents were looking up to the
Hare Krishna
.
For at least the decade following the disappearance, they actively searched for Germán.
The first year in Fuengirola they didn't even work.
Later they opened a restaurant bar, called
Arcoiris
, where they served Asturian cuisine until retirement.
-How did Germán's disappearance change your life?
-In an indescribable way.
My parents did not go back to what they were.
My father had depression for many, many years and I can't stop wondering how my mother managed to get through this without going crazy.
As for me, I don't know what my life would have been like if this hadn't happened.
From then on my parents were protective of me, more nervous about what might happen, more aware of me.
It is very difficult to understand that a son dies but when he disappears ... Let's suppose that he died: do not tell you how he died, if he suffered, or if he is still alive and they did something terrible to him or manipulated him so that he would not want to return to his family .... That uncertainty is a trauma that cannot be overcome.
-Do you hope to find him alive?
-I don't know how to explain it ... Hope that a person is still alive without contacting you 30 years later?
What could have happened to him?
In my mind and in my soul it's still alive, but I'm not waiting like the first day for the phone to ring and tell you "it's me" or "we've found it."
All the families of long-term missing persons who participate in this series of reports have ended up asking for the
declaration of the death
of the absentee - it can be done from 10 years - so, once the parents have died, save the problems with the inheritance to the next generation.
Not the Quintana Blanco.
-It would be like admitting he's dead.
We have arranged things financially so that it is not a problem in the future.
But I haven't even considered it.
For me it is like unplugging the patient from the machine.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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