The newspaper ABC reports on the exclusive sale of the Pazo de Meirás by MiKeli Estate Agency
“A luxury real estate agency sells the Pazo de Meirás for eight million euros.”
The Franco family confirms they are putting the property up for sale due to being unable to cover its maintenance costs.
Barely a week after it became known that the Franco family had had the Pazo de Meirás appraised for sale, a website already offer it “exclusively” among properties for sale at a price of eight million euros. The real estate agency mikeli.es lists it, albeit with limited details: the 1,002 square metres of floor space are barely mentioned, but there is no reference to the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, or interior images of the Pazo. In fact, the website provides only a brief gallery of photographs of the building’s exterior.
However, in another section of the website, a video is shown that, using the sound of an old NO-DO and its black-and-white footage, does display scenes of the current state of the Pazo, allowing viewers to see the chapel, the entrance hall, the library, and a few small rooms. That said, neither the large living rooms, nor the bedrooms, nor the kitchen or the service areas are shown. The video is subtitled in English, suggesting that the intention is to attract potential foreign buyers.
The real estate agency presents it as “an extraordinary estate full of history” and acknowledges that managing its sale “represents a major professional milestone.”
Impossible to maintain
The decision to sell the emblematic Pazo de Meirás, summer residence of the dictator Francisco Franco, is due to the inability of his heirs to cover the property’s maintenance costs, according to his grandson Francis. This reality, however, has not yet resulted in a unanimous decision among the grandchildren regarding Meirás’s future, as two of Carmen Franco’s seven children disagreed with putting it up for sale. While the heirs’ final position was being agreed upon, they decided to start the appraisal process, as there was initially no set price for its market launch.
The announcement of the upcoming sale comes at a sensitive moment for the Franco family, after last year the Galician public administrations opened several fronts to determine whether the donation that led to the acquisition of the property was legal or not. Xunta, the Provincial Council of La Coruña, and around thirty municipalities are examining whether there were “grounds for nullity” in the contributions made by citizens and city councils in 1938, which allowed a city board of notables to buy the property from the heirs of Emilia Pardo Bazán.
Those who decide to acquire Meirás must be aware, however, that its designation as a Cultural Heritage Site imposes certain obligations, including opening the Pazo to the public four times a month. In fact, managing visits was one of the triggers for the left-wing and nationalist campaign to return Meirás to public ownership, after Carmen Franco delegated this issue to the Francisco Franco Foundation, whose representatives announced they would take the opportunity to exalt the dictator’s figure.
With this news, they reported on the exclusive sale of the Pazo de Meirás by the real estate agency Mikeli.