Praia da Luz, the resort still under a long shadow

Thirteen years after Madeleine Mccann’s disappearance, Peter Stanford reports on a town left struggling to clear its name

It has been 13 years since Madeleine Mccann vanished from her family’s rented holiday apartment in the staid, sleepy Portuguese seaside town of Praia da Luz. The shadow cast by the events of May 3 2007 has never quite disappeared; with the announcement this week by German police that 43-year-old Christian Brückner is now the case’s “main suspect”, the harsh glare of the spotlight is upon it once more.

The 3,000 permanent residents of Luz, as they call it, are said to be more expats than locals, with a sizeable British contingent. Among them are those who continue to pray for the safe return of Madeleine every Sunday during mass at the whitewashed 16th-century Catholic Church of Our Lady of Light.

The same people, though, are reported to bemoan – usually in private – the pariah status Luz gained 13 years ago following what is thought to be the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history. Many choose to stay silent when asked about it in public, hoping against hope that their reticence will finally make the subject go away.

Yet the resentment lies in plain view in the town; on red traffic signs, where underneath STOP the words “Mccann Circus” have been appended. The graffiti refers to the tourists who continue to turn up each year on its palm-lined promenade, looking out on to the turquoise water of the Atlantic and asking vendors to direct them not to the beach, but to the spot where the three-year-old disappeared.

There were even ghoulish “Maddie Tours”, at one stage. But since 2017, when a Merseyside grandmother bought Apartment 5A Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva for half the asking price and surrounded it with high hedges and a heavy wooden gate, would-be sightseers have been denied the chance to peer into the crime scene.

Their curiosity isn’t the only thing that offends. It is also that immediate connection made in many minds between Praia da Luz and child abduction. Those residents who can be persuaded to talk insist that Luz has been unjustly stigmatised, and that it is one of the safest places to bring a child in a country that, moreover, prides itself on loving its children (and, some add, would never have left them alone in a holiday apartment while out to dinner…).

That now lost reputation as a peaceful, crime-free, child-friendly destination may well have been part of Praia da Luz’s appeal when Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry Mccann, booked their family holiday there in the spring of 2007. This week’s identification of Brückner, a drifter and petty criminal, has been called the notorious case’s “most significant development in 13 years”. He lived on and off in the Luz area, was there in 2007, at the time Madeleine went missing, and had existing convictions for sexual abuse of children. He is currently serving a prison sentence in Germany for the rape of a 72-year-old in 2005 in Praia da Luz.

Pictures have been published of a farmhouse, 12 minutes’ drive from the holiday apartment complex, where the suspect was staying on May 3 2007. British police were, in 2014, pictured searching scrubland that was just a few hundred yards from the Ocean Club, but Brückner’s base was further away from the town.

He is also said to have moved around regularly, often living out of his white-and-yellow VW Westfalia camper van. Such an itinerant lifestyle would have allowed him to blend in unnoticed with the transient “hippy, surfer, artist” community that congregates just further west along the Algarve coast from Praia da Luz, according to Brit Mary Lussiana, who lives there.

Off the main tourist trail and stretching from Burgau, the next place along from Luz, to the clifftop village of Sagres, Lussiana says this is an area with a wilder, sparser environment, “popular with people who rent and move on and a world apart from Praia da Luz, with its good clinics, hairdressers and a settled expat community”.

Included in the German police announcement was their assertion that Madeleine is dead (Scotland Yard treats her as a missing person). Their words will be the latest of many crushing blows the Mccanns have had to endure during their long fight to find out what happened to their daughter.

In Praia da Luz, however, the revelation is being greeted as offering the prospect that the cloud over its name might one day be lifted; Brückner’s outsider status a potential exoneration of the people of Praia da Luz (a 2018 Netflix documentary alleged that there was a childtrafficking network in the Algarve at the time Madeleine disappeared).

Originally an isolated seafaring community, which spread its fishing nets out on its beach and caught tuna to process in local canneries, in the Nineties Praia da Luz was swept up in the tide of development drifting westwards along the coast of the Algarve from its main city, Faro, which turned Albufeira, Vilamoura and Praia da Rocha into high-rise resorts, with golf on tap.

The apartment complex where the Mccanns stayed, operated by the British tour operator Mark Warner, was built in the Nineties as a key component in the town’s economic rebirth. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Two years after Madeleine vanished, Warner launched a legal action against its insurers to recover lost earnings as tourists stayed away in droves from Praia da Luz. The very name was enough to make holidaying parents of

Many residents stay silent when asked about the case, hoping against hope the subject will go away

small children shudder in horror. By 2015, the company shut up shop.

Today, the complex is run as Luz Ocean Club, whose website promises guests a “hidden gem” that is an “ideal destination for families”. If only rebranding was so simple.

“The hotel itself wasn’t that bad,” reads the most recent post on the Tripadvisor site for Luz Ocean Club. “I did enjoy the view. But every night, I kept the lights on. I know it’s stupid, but Madeleine Mccann was abducted here, wasn’t she?”

That message was left back in February; since then Covid-19 has brought the whole Portuguese tourist industry to a halt. But Luz Ocean Club is now reopening, and the Portuguese government is in discussions with their British counterpart about an air bridge to enable visitors to start visiting again this summer. Might business finally start picking up?

Some who know Praia da Luz warn against attributing its troubles over the past 13 years solely to the notoriety it earned because of the little girl from Leicestershire’s disappearance. “Don’t forget,” says this paper’s crime correspondent, Martin Evans, who spent nine months based there in 2007 reporting the case and has returned several times since, “that the financial crash came the year after”.

In the early 2000s, the town had enjoyed an influx of money from Ireland, in particular, generated by an economy then referred to as the Celtic Tiger. Popular with Irish buyers was the terracotta-coloured Estrela da Luz apartment complex, with its own bar and restaurant. “That all collapsed when their home economy went into recession,” says Evans, “and they were sold off cheaply. When I returned, the whole place was deserted.”

And the signs of recent neglect are still all too visible. Another Tripadvisor reviewer, writing in September 2018, describes the Luz Ocean during his holiday there as “tired and in need of some investment”.

Major setbacks to a local economy can take years to reverse, but nevertheless the past two years have been, reports Claire Sadler, who runs Luz Beach Apartments, the busiest ones yet in the slow process of reinventing Praia da Luz. She remains determinedly upbeat that a new future is possible for the town.

Though acutely conscious of the legacy of the Mccanns’ unending anguish, Sadler seems to speak for the community in Luz when she says, “everyone just wants closure”.