As visitors pose for selfies in the Portuguese resort where the British child disappeared, a breakthrough seems further away than ever
The police have packed up, the diggers and radar scanners gone from the Algarve scrubland. The latest search for Madeleine McCann, the British toddler who vanished from a Portuguese holiday apartment 2007, has ended quietly without any apparent breakthrough.
After 18 years of intermittent searches, this one, led by German police, may well be the last. In Praia da Luz, a seaside town etched into the world’s memory by the tragedy, that realisation lands with a mix of relief and weariness. Locals barely speak about the case now, if at all. The McCann investigation brought an unrelenting glare of media attention that many here would prefer to forget.
But even as the formal search ends, the town’s association with the disappearance of Madeleine remains stubbornly intact, kept alive not just by police work but also the trickle of true crime tourists retracing a story they know from Netflix specials and acres of news coverage over the past two decades.
The Ocean Club complex in Praia da Luz. Photograph: Wirestock, Inc./Alamy
Some pose for selfies outside the Ocean Club holiday apartment where Madeleine was last seen, or dine in the complex’s tapas restaurant where her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, were eating when she vanished. Some play amateur sleuth in the town’s cobbled alleyways as though they were the famous sets of a long-running drama.
When British friends Joanne Sheppard, 60, and Jane Thorp, 61, began planning a trip together, they settled on Praia da Luz partly for that reason. “When we decided to go on holiday, I said I would like to see the place where [Madeleine] went missing and I’d like to sit and see the scope of the area so we could get a feel of various routes where maybe Gerry McCann and Kate walked,” Sheppard said.
The pair were outside the Ocean Club on Thursday morning to check if “anyone was milling around” the McCann apartment while German and Portuguese police were scouring scrubland and abandoned buildings a mile away in Atalaia, near Lagos, which was once home to a farming community. They had already spent hours at the tapas restaurant on Tuesday and had made plans to return.
“No one was speaking about Madeleine,” Thorp said of their first visit. As they entered the resort, reception staff asked the women not to take photos but that did not stop Thorp, who said she was not as interested in the case as Sheppard. “Someone is in that apartment at the moment, we saw them the other night,” the carer from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire added.
Jane Thorp (left) and Joanne Sheppard. Photograph: supplied
Sheppard’s interest in Madeleine’s disappearance was piqued when she watched an eight-part Netflix documentary series in 2019.
“I watched the Netflix series and then I started delving a bit deeper because something was amiss. And if you actually delve deeper … and start with the PJ [Portuguese Polícia Judiciária] files, you’ll see a whole new truth emerge,” the decorator from Nottingham said.
She had been gripped by what she said were the “numerous holes” and “contradictions” in the case. She dismissed the latest searches as “a whole waste of time”, proffered theories and spoke of “hard evidence” and media “manipulation” before heading to the nearby beach for the day.
Town residents feel uneasy about the ghoulish obsession with Madeleine’s disappearance. Metres away from the Ocean Club, at the Baptista supermarket’s cafe, a British businessman, Tahir, who splits his time between London and the Algarve said he came across some tourists outside the McCann apartment just last week. “They’d obviously spotted it or they’d known where it was, and they were taking pictures of the apartment. I felt like going up to them and saying: ‘That’s so morbid. What’s the matter with you people?’” the 45-year-old said.
“They’ve been doing that for years,” replied David, 80, a British expat sitting at a nearby table. “A lot of people come down here and they want to drive past that [building], just to say this is where it was.”
Simon Foy, the former head of the Metropolitan police’s homicide and serious crime command, who led Operation Grange to find Madeleine in 2011 before retiring in 2012, said the case had captured the public’s imagination because it embodied “every parent’s nightmare”.
“When I was working in homicide investigations in the Met, occasionally these cases would come along which for some reason just connected around the public consciousness,” he said. “It’s a whole load of things: it’s a young blond girl, it’s a middle-class family, it’s a holiday, it’s every parent’s nightmare. All that sort of stuff very unpredictably would combine together and you would go from virtually minimal media interest and coverage to significant and substantial media coverage, and that was all before the days of social media.”
Foy, who has not been involved in the investigation since retiring, said the popularity of true crime documentaries and dramas in which complex cases are neatly wrapped up in one-hour episodes had also contributed to the public’s enduring fascination with the case.
“What then happens is that you get people’s avid fascination and expectation that it’s all going to get solved really quickly, and it’s all nice and neat, and follows nice dramatic lines, and in reality it never does,” he said. “In real life, it’s messy, and you can’t get anything more messy than the whole Madeleine McCann investigation, the whole saga. There are human beings, there’s pressure and people make mistakes. It’s different. It’s never as perfect as it’s portrayed in the media world. But people are absolutely fascinated by a story like that, it just happens that this one is a real-life tragedy.”
It is this fascination with the case, and in turn Praia da Luz, that has led some residents to blame the McCanns for damaging the town’s reputation. Road signs in the town were once defaced with graffiti reading “McCann circus”. The signs have now been cleaned up but still bear traces of the town’s unease.
Hundreds of journalists descended on the town to report on the mystery of the three-year-old girl, but tourism dropped and businesses suffered. “This place was like a ghost town at one point,” said Tahir, who did not want to give his surname.
It is why he and many others hope the case can be solved. “Everyone has got an interest in what happens to Madeleine. For locals, it’s still closure that they’re looking for. It’s not just the family; everyone wants to know. It’s gone on so long. There was a point where locals wanted to bury the story because it was affecting businesses and all the rentals went down, but I think it’s got over that point,” Tahir said.
A retired Portuguese businessman in his 60s, who did not want to give his name, said: “[It has been] 18 years and we’ve had enough. For the family it’s a pity, but it’s enough. This area was full of people, it was a joy, a happy family place that was completely transformed and completely dead after [Madeleine disappeared]. Now it’s OK but it took 10 years.”
Madeleine McCann. Photograph: PA Media
The search, the latest in a series of renewed efforts by German prosecutors, was said to have been the last chance to build a case against the prime suspect, Christian Brückner. He denies any involvement. The countdown is now on to the 48-year-old’s imminent release from a German prison, where he is being held for the rape of an American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005.
After 18 years, hundreds of leads and still no trace of the missing girl, the emotional toll must weigh heavily on Madeleine’s family, who have not commented on this week’s search.
And for a place that once hoped its name would be reclaimed by the sun, the sea and the quiet rhythm of local life, the McCann case still casts a long shadow, one that no end-of-search announcement can fully erase.
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