The Mystery of the Nameless Girl Found Dead in a Spanish Border Town

On September 4, 1990, the discovery of a girl hanging from a pine tree rocked the small Spanish Mediterranean town of Portbou. She was barefoot and wearing blue dungarees, and the look on her face was peaceful, almost angelic. “It looked very much like a suicide,” writes Giles Tremlett, “but there were many questions.” How did she climb the tree and physically do it? Who was she? “She carried no ID, no passport, no money, no wallet, no train ticket. Her pockets were empty. It was as though her identity had been deliberately erased.” Tremlett recounts this decades-long mystery for The Guardian, drawing details from all the people, including the girl’s sister, obsessed with finding answers.

Few corpses remain unidentified in Figueres. In such cases, Lacaci said, they are usually from the margins of society – sex workers, addicts or indigents far from home. The Portbou girl did not fit, he said. Like most people involved in the case – police, officials, townsfolk or journalists – he would never forget her. In 2017, the police officer turned author Rafael Jiménez even wrote a novel, imagining her story. He called it The Hanging Bride in the Land of Wind.

There were many reasons for suspecting murder. How, instead of travelling 45 miles south to Siena, did Evi travel 600 miles north and then west, crossing the borders of France and Spain – two countries she had never visited? What happened to her ID, money and railcard? How, in the middle of the night, had she found the pine tree and climbed the narrow, steep concrete steps leading up towards it? Why would a girl who had just bought herself a new swimsuit, who was about to start a new life, choose to take her own life, in such a public and dramatic fashion, so far from home?