DMAX and HBO Max perform an “autopsy” on the building that burned down 18 years ago, sparking a series of speculations about the origin of the fire
Accident or sabotage? Can a cigarette butt burn down an entire building? What were two people doing inside during the fire? What does ex-Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo paint in this story? Who were the members of the Reyzábal family, the former owners of the Windsor?
These are some of the questions posed by ‘The Curse of Windsor’, a four-episode documentary series (this Sunday night at 10pm with the last two episodes airing on DMAX and now fully available on the HBO platform Max) that offers viewers a detective game to try and solve one of the most puzzling Spanish cases of the early 21st century: the fire that destroyed the Windsor Tower, Madrid’s iconic skyscraper, on the cold night of February 12, 2005.
Coinciding with the eighteenth anniversary of the event, this new project for the thematic channel, prepared in collaboration with Producciones del Barrio, focuses on this fire that kept the country on edge for a long early morning. The Windsor Tower was an office building over 100 meters high in the financial heart of the city. It burned down completely and the incident was broadcast live on television. As the flames destroyed a 32-story building, a multitude of questions arose that remain unanswered today and opened the door to all sorts of hypotheses.
“We obtained several findings during production and interviews, such as throwing out, without wanting to be a judge, part of the speculations and legends that existed around the fire,” continues the director and screenwriter of the documentary series, Raül Calàbria. Together with the rest of the team, he conducts the ‘autopsy’ of the steel and concrete corpse that the iconic building has been turned into, a tour of everything that caused the biggest skyscraper fire in Spain’s history. Because the interesting proposal of this project is that all theories and hypotheses about the cause of the fire are on the table. The spectator can enter the game and decide.
After the fire, the flames erupted due to a series of suspicious circumstances: there was no water pressure in the building, mysterious blue flames appeared, and the fire spread downwards instead of upwards, as usual.
Unable to do anything, the firefighters leave the building, which eventually collapses like New York’s Twin Towers in 2001, just four years earlier. Before the black tower collapses, some shadows appear in one of the building’s windows. Those so-called ‘Windsor ghosts’ that give rise to all kinds of speculation about what or who they were, what they were looking for and especially how they ended up in the burning building.
The first sentence about the fire was about the cigarette butt that one of the construction workers had smoked. Was it a failed investigation? “It was weird. It’s strange that two people appear in the building, the famous ghosts, that the judge witnesses it, but it doesn’t go any further. It’s strange that the firefighters were so quick to say it was reflexes. Why do they get into this eggplant?” wonders Calàbria.
“It was a sentence that was solved very quickly and easily. A lot of questions were left hanging in the air,” added Víctor Morilla, executive producer and head of plot and development of the project at Producciones del Barrio. In this case, can a cigarette butt be the cause of a major fire? “Even the firefighters say it’s weird,” says the screenwriter.
“It is also strange that the building was demolished so quickly, when the architects said there was no danger of collapse. Why was demolition ruled out and not investigated further? It opens the door to speculation and explanations,” emphasizes Calàbria, adding that with this case, to which they have devoted more than two years of production, “you end up getting lost in a swamp, which is what makes this story so special and legendary”.
Meanwhile, the documentary series also covers a less discussed topic during the event: the history of power and the internal struggles of the Reyzábal, one of the wealthiest families in the country.
“The Windsor had many different ingredients, from the conspiracy of ghosts to the alleged banking plots, or suspicions about how the fire was stopped. We discovered that there was a family story behind it and that allowed us to understand the genesis of that building,” explains Morilla. And finally, the appearance on the stage of one of the ubiquitous characters in the most opaque numbers of contemporary Spain: the ex-Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo.
Source: La Verdad
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