The ordeal of the centenarian grandmother wrongly evicted five years ago

Five years ago, on February 19, 2021, Rosario Bravo became news against her will. At 97 years old, this grandmother from Hospitalet de Llobregat was evicted by mistakeA mistake in the eviction proceedings at the L'Hospitalet de Llobregat courthouse led the court officials to enter the top-floor apartment—Bravo's home—instead of the main penthouse, the apartment where the tenants who had unpaid rent lived and against whom the eviction order should have been directed. She wasn't home at the time, and by the time her children discovered their mother had been evicted by mistake, the apartment had already been emptied, the locks changed, and an alarm installed. Five years later, Bravo still hasn't been able to recover her belongings nor has she received any compensation for the error that took many of her memories with it. Among them was a notebook given to her by her son, Emiliano Caballero, in which she had handwritten her memoirs. There were personal anecdotes about the Civil War in her hometown of Santa Cruz de Mudela (Ciudad Real), her two years of marriage—her husband died in a work accident while working for Renfe—how the family managed on their own, and how she emigrated to Hospitalet de Llobregat. Other important mementos also disappeared, such as her brothers' and brothers-in-law's wedding rings and photos of her husband and other deceased relatives. Even today, the family doesn't know what happened to all of that or where it ended up, if at all. In a conversation with ARA, Emiliano Caballero recalls the ordeal of the past five years, during which the case has gone through two legal proceedings: a criminal case that was dismissed, and a civil case in which the court ruled in favor of Rosario Bravo regarding the judicial error in her case, but determined that compensation was not warranted. "They haven't apologized to us."

"They haven't apologized, they haven't returned anything, and they haven't compensated us," laments Caballero, who points to the eviction officer as ultimately responsible for a mistake that has disrupted the last five years of his mother's life. She is now 102 years old and, although she returned to live in her apartment for a few months, Caballero also laments the lack of support he says he has received from the institutions he has contacted, including the Ministry of Justice, the Generalitat (Catalan government), and the L'Hospitalet City Council.

A 97-year-old grandmother was evicted by mistake: "They left almost nothing."