If a few days ago the host of the talk show Aída Nízar “the brown disorder” visited the house of the singer Manu Tenorio in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, according to some residents of the urbanization, the usual atmosphere in its surroundings is the coming and going of people who come and go for their daily tasks. Only the presence of female reporters and television cameras, numerous in recent times, has somewhat altered the normality since the artist publicly denounced that his tenants (a family of five people, three of them minors) would have left to pay the rent.
This particular and high-profile case has brought back to the center of the news the debate on the occupation of housing, which mixes concepts and generates a social alarm not supported by data: only 0.06% of homes are “squatted” and in the usual case, it is vacated immediately. In fact, the family accused of this has maintained that it pays the income directly to the Public Treasury, with which it would have an alleged debt. The legal representatives of Tenorio deny the argument of the tenants, who have not been able to justify their version with any document. Sources from the law firm Guzmán y Martín consulted by this newspaper choose to be “cautious” at this time while waiting for the Sanlúcar court to begin the procedure following the lawsuit for non-payment that they have filed.
The house is located in a quiet area of Sanlúcar, a town of about 70,000 inhabitants and a summer resort for many families during the summer months. Just a few minutes from the Plaza del Cabildo, the nerve centre of the coastal town, the urbanisation seems quiet except for the media hype that surrounds it in recent times.
The residents, some regulars and others on vacation, seem accustomed to the presence of journalists, most of them from television, as evidenced by their reactions. Most of the neighbors who look around the entrance and exit areas of the houses avoid expressing themselves on the case of Manu Tenorio’s house. “I don’t know anything and I don’t want to know,” says one of them. “I’m not the right person to ask this question,” suggests another person. Some are reluctant to meet journalists again in search of information, in the absence of reliable documents corroborating the versions given by one or the other of the parties.
“They are not squatters”
The house, as this media learned, had been rented by the brother of the woman in the family now accused of non-payment. This is what a veteran resident of the urbanization indicates, who recounts it this way: “These people have a four-year rental contract. I don’t know if they pay or not. “Before, his brother was renting.” The woman, who rejects the term “squatters” to describe Manu Tenorio’s tenants, specifies that the singer’s grandmother and his mother lived in the house for “about ten years.” “We love her very much,” he says, “and now the mother lives with her daughter.” “I don’t know if they stopped paying, but they are not squatters,” insists this neighbor.
This newspaper offered the City Council of Sanlúcar (governed by the IU and the PSOE) the opportunity to comment on any issue related to this specific case or the housing situation in general in the coastal city, without wanting to give any explanation.
The artist, who is defending himself against accusations about his debts on the social network X, formerly Twitter, has been publicly criticized by Podemos. “He is a defaulter who encourages the false discourse of squatting,” said his state spokesperson, María Teresa Pérez, at a press conference. The latest was Tenorio’s request to be interviewed by Pablo Iglesias on Canal Red to give his version of the case, on which Vanitatis reported this Thursday that the property had a preventive seizure annotation in favor of the Sanlúcar City Council since April 2023, and that the singer would have already resolved.
Only 0.06% of homes are “squatted”
The recent presentation of cases of alleged occupation in some media does not correspond to the data. The Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, recently estimated the risk of occupation in Spain. “It is less than 0.06%,” she calculated, based on the 16,765 known acts of burglary and usurpation of properties, out of a total stock of 20.9 million homes. “We do not live in a country where you go on vacation, buy bread or walk the dog and they occupy your house,” a judge commented in this newspaper.
The data, and the law for years, also deny that it is “impossible” to evict some squatters, a slogan that has permeated part of the population and is taken up precisely by a neighbor of Manu Tenorio’s house who, like all the people consulted, prefers to remain anonymous: “I don’t really see what these people are doing, but as long as the law doesn’t change,” she said about the alleged “squatting.” As this media has already reported, there is a false alarm on the issue because the law already guarantees express eviction during searches in the habitual residence and the second home.
