Cortijo Jurado

On a rise beside the road into Campanillas, on the outskirts of Málaga, stands Cortijo Jurado, a mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois agricultural estate built by the Heredia family — reputedly to the design of a French architect — in an eclectic style mixing English neo-Gothic with Nordic touches. The city's register of protected buildings gives it 1,900 square metres, an unknown architect and poor condition. A branch of the Heredias sold it in 1925. The dark chapters begin underground: local tradition speaks of a two-kilometre passage to Cortijo Colmenares, now blocked with concrete, and of a torture chamber a neighbour is said to have seen in 1942. That legend carries with it the disappearance of young women in the nineteenth century — but it is worth stating what cannot be found: not one named victim, not one complaint, not one court case, not one news report. Even the name of the setting postdates the supposed crimes: the estate has been called "Jurado" only since the 1970s, after the Vega Jurado family. Since 2022 it has belonged to the Sinerba group, which plans an office complex there and will restore the house as its headquarters.

Cortijo Jurado has two files, and only one of them was ever written down. The first is that of a nineteenth-century farm and pleasure house that Málaga City Council calls 'the most monumental surviving example of lowland rural architecture using a learned language for its formalisation'. That file genuinely exists: it has a reference number — H05 in the catalogue of protected buildings of the city's General Urban Development Plan — and you can download it as a PDF. The second is the file of 'the crimes at the cortijo': girls who vanished in the nineteenth century, cellars fitted with torture machines, a family of industrialists turned into a cult. Of that second file, having gone looking for it, we have not found a single page. Start with the one that exists. The municipal record describes a large building set on a hilltop, commanding its surroundings, on a terraced platform that absorbs the slope. Rectangular plan around a central courtyard of the same shape, with four ranges around it. Two storeys and 1,900 square metres. Above them rise the lookout tower and the chapel, the latter with both an external door and direct internal access to the choir: it is in English Gothic style, with ogival openings and doorway crowned by a slender gable, and inside a plain masonry altarpiece in the same idiom. The remaining façades distribute segmental openings at regular intervals, and an elaborate string course decorated with heavy dentils separates the two floors. Pitched roofs of curved tile. Style: eclectic, with a neo-Gothic chapel. Period: mid-nineteenth century. Architect: unknown. State of conservation: poor. That 'unknown' is worth underlining, because almost everything told about the cortijo begins with a French architect. Sergio Martos Nogueras — a primary schoolteacher and the grandson of labourers who lived on the estate, who published an article about it in 2023 in the magazine of the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration — uses the correct verb: popular memory has it that a French architect built it for the Heredia family. He adds that no documents of its construction survive. Reviewing the case the same year, the legal magazine Economist & Jurist said the same thing: the papers that would explain the property's origins have disappeared. The ownership, as the municipal record gives it, does the legend no favours either. The cortijo belonged initially to a minor branch of the Heredia family, which sold it in 1925; during its last years of use it belonged to the Jurado family, which is where the name comes from; then came long years of abandonment and decay of its fabric. It had a double use: agricultural and stock-raising enterprise, and country retreat. Martos lengthens the chain and supplies a date worth keeping: Heredia, Larios, Quesada and Vega Jurado, and it is the last of these families that gives the estate the name Cortijo Jurado in the 1970s. Before that, he writes, it was known as Lagar de Jurado or finca Jurado, because after Mendizábal's disentailment it had passed to one Diego Jiménez de Jurado. About two kilometres away stands Cortijo Colmenares, which in the municipal catalogue is the immediately preceding entry, H04, and whose history is documented from top to bottom: it appears under that name as early as 1581 and in the Ensenada cadastre of 1747 as a farmhouse; in 1835 it belonged to Antonio Colmenares and later passed to the Larios family, who radically transformed the eighteenth-century building. In 1987 a company bought it, turned the estate into a golf course, completed the restoration of the building in 1990 and commissioned the course from the Finnish architect Koski Kuronen. Today it is the Guadalhorce golf club. That, it is worth knowing, is the far end of the legendary tunnel. Because the other story runs, in the signed versions we have been able to read, like this: that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several girls disappeared around the cortijo and their bodies turned up on the bank of the river Campanillas; that the Heredias — and by extension the Larios — had imported from their contacts in France and England satanic rites practised in the cellars; that a two-kilometre passage linked the cortijo to Colmenares and served to move the corpses; and that in 1942 a local man got into the galleries and found a chamber with human bones and torture machinery. On that frame the layers accumulated: executions nearby during the Civil War, use as a hospital, the cellars turned into holding cells, a gambling den, a brothel. And then, in the twentieth century, poltergeists and electronic voice phenomena. The rest of the building's history is pure town planning. In 2002 paperwork began for a luxury hotel that would rehabilitate the cortijo as its reception area and social lounge; the scheme belonged to Grupo Mirador — 200 rooms, four stars — with works from 2005, and at the end of 2007 the catalogue record itself described them as under way. The developer's debts brought the project down and the building sat still for almost two decades. In 2019 it was offered for sale or rent at 12.5 million euros, advertised as a nineteenth-century estate with a luxury hotel licence across 45,000 square metres. In August 2022 the city's planning councillor confirmed to El Español that a buyer was interested and was asking to change the hotel use for something else, on condition that it was not residential and could demonstrate 'general interest for the city'. That buyer was the Málaga group Sinerba, which acquired the estate in 2022. Its property arm, SUBA, commissioned Ángel Asenjo y Asociados to design a 32,229-square-metre business campus around the manor house: some 20,000 square metres of lettable office space, 40,000 of open ground, underground parking, catering and an auditorium, plus temporary coliving accommodation for people working there. The regional environment department issued a favourable environmental report on 3 January 2025, and the estimated initial investment is 25 million euros. What awaits the historic building is a full restoration and a distinctly prosaic fate: becoming the company's registered head office.

Cortijo Jurado is private property and has no public entrance. The protected-buildings catalogue of Málaga's general plan lists it as entry H05 of Zone H, Campanillas-Guadalhorce, under the address "Ctra. Campanillas, s/n". That road is signposted today as Avenida José Ortega y Gasset, postcode 29590, in the Campanillas district of Málaga, about 9.7 km (6 miles) west of the city centre. The entry records a floor area of 1,900 m² over two storeys, an isolated layout, a mid-nineteenth-century date, an unknown author and a state of conservation of "malo". Protection is graded Arquitectónica-I, and what it covers is set out as "Fachadas, volumen envolvente, elementos ornamentales". The catalogue's own description is a fair account of what the road gives: "En la cima de un cerro y dominando sus contornos se asienta esta gran edificación sobre una plataforma aterraza que salva el desnive del terreno." Above the two storeys rise the lookout tower and the chapel, whose pointed-arch doorway is finished with a slender gable. The land is fenced, and since late 2022 the estate has belonged to the Sinerba group. The architects' file for the scheme —Campus Cortijo Jurado— gives 32,229 m² of floor area and a span of 2022 to 2026, and the Junta de Andalucía cleared its environmental assessment in January 2025 with conditions attached. The "malo" rating predates the collapse of the hotel project whose paperwork began in 2002. The house then stood open for the better part of twenty years, with unprotected voids, decayed floors, cellars and wells. One of the young people who went in to explore it fell into a well and was left with a permanent spinal injury. Entry without the owner's permission is trespass under Spanish law. Two more buildings in the same catalogue file stand nearby. H04, listed as "Ctra. Cártama km 7 — Golf Guadalhorce", is Cortijo Colmenares, the far end of the supposed tunnel: a company bought it in 1987 and finished restoring the house in 1990, having commissioned the golf course from the Finnish architect Koski Kuronen. Its state of conservation is recorded as "bueno" and it is a private sports club. H06 is the parish church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Campanillas itself; its address in the catalogue is calle Ruiz y Mayquez 29.