• Opinion It will be new, but still nothing normal
  • Opinion Closures... and openings!

The stalls with light and overflowing with fresh products are the exception. Here the norm is closed down, blinds lowered, aisles in darkness and an atypical stillness for any market. Especially if it is located on the corner between Hermosilla and General Díaz Porlier streets, in the heart of the Salamanca district. However, this is the day-to-day life of the Torrijos market, whose shopkeepers are leading a Numantine resistance against a Socimi that wants to make this enclave a luxury shopping center.

The lifelong traders who remain open are known as Los Últimos de Torrijos and in front of them they have an investment giant: Numulae Gestión de Servicios Socimi S.A., which they describe as a "vulture fund". A company controlled by Fe Seguros that on its own website states that in 2022 "it acquired the Torrijos Market (12,935 m²), in the Salamanca district of Madrid", despite not being its sole owner.

Taking advantage of the pandemic and that many of the market partners (owners of the stalls) were about to retire, Numulae began to acquire market shares, and the stores were closing definitively until only 10 remain open.

A purchase strategy that the last of Torrijos have denounced judicially. "The market partners have a preferential right of purchase compared to those who have come from outside [Numulae] and that right has not been respected," explains Fernando Escanciano after his fruit stand while ordering the genre.

"The market is made up of 44 partners and each one has the award for the operation of a premises. It is not that the place is only mine, it is that I own one of the 44 parts of society, but Numulae managed to get the absolute majority, they became sole administrators and the center is in this state thanks to them, "he laments next to the scale to weigh the fruit in a business that his father opened three decades ago.

Since the purchase of Numulae began, merchants have faced breakdowns in bathrooms that are not repaired, problems with air conditioning and heating and even with lighting.

Some corridors are in darkness. Navigating through them, Gemma Fernandez's salting stand appears decorated with phrases that invite resistance: "When spiders weave together they can catch a lion," reads a sign.

Her case is special: "I am rented. I tried to buy the share from the owner for the same money offered by the vulture fund [170,000 euros], but my landlady sold it to them and they tried to throw me out." So he went to court. "They sent me a burofax telling me that on November 1, 2020 I had to leave and a notice of eviction, but the judge stopped it because the demands filed for the right of preferential purchase remain unresolved," he says.

Upstairs, pollero David Lopez claims that Numulae has also tried to kick out the partners and owners. "They are trying to make our lives impossible. Many of my colleagues who are partners have been sent eviction letters. I'm waiting for mine right now," he complains.

"They are trying to buy for two dollars what is worth millions to cover themselves," summarizes a regular customer loaded with his shopping bags.

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