McCann mystery

Search revives memories town wants to forget

- Emine Sinmaz

The police have packed up, the diggers and radar scanners have gone from the Algarve scrubland. The latest search for Madeleine McCann, the British three-year-old who vanished from a Portuguese holiday apartment in 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, Christian Brückner, prime suspect in the McCann case, is in prison in Germany for a rape in Praia da Luz.

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 by the trickle of true-crime tourists retracing a story they know from Netflix specials and acres of news coverage over two decades.

Some pose for selfies outside the Ocean Club holiday apartment where Madeleine was last seen, dine in its tapas restaurant where her parents, Kate and Gerry, were eating when she vanished and play amateur sleuth in the town's cobbled alleyways as though they were the famous sets of a long running drama. When 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.