Tourist takes Sorolla painting lost in Seville home to Murcia: 'I thought the frame was cool'
A 57-year-old tourist from Murcia picked up in Seville a painting left on the street as its owners loaded their car. He took it home, unaware it was a valuable work being sought by police.
Published on 01/07/2026 - 15:21 GMT+2•Updated 16:38
Andrés Hurtado didn’t go to Seville in search of art. He was there for a few days’ sightseeing and, on Saturday at around 16:30, in the kind of unforgiving heat that gives the city its reputation, he stumbled across something lying on the pavement that caught his eye for the least artistic of reasons: the frame.
“I saw some lads dump a painting in the street.” And he thought: “What a cool frame.” “To be honest, I didn’t even look at the painting, I just took it up to the hotel with me,” local media quote him as saying. He walked off with it, literally, in a shopping bag he had bought in an Asian bazaar, without realising that he had just rescued an original Sorolla that its owners had forgotten in the middle of a lightning-fast move to their beach house.
From suspicion to artificial intelligence
Doubts started creeping in almost straight away. “With so many replicas and fakes around, I never thought it could be an original Sorolla,” admitted Hurtado, a former supermarket employee who is currently unemployed. So he did what anyone does in 2026 when they have an existential question about a canvas: he put it to artificial intelligence. The reply opened up the possibility that the work might be genuine: “It confirmed that it could be.”
Only half convinced, he even sounded out an auction house, which he says was ready to offer him thousands of euros for the piece. The snag was that Hurtado still did not know that the painting was not lost in the romantic sense, but had been officially reported missing: its owners had already gone to the police after realising they had left it behind on that Seville pavement.
A happy ending
When he found out that the work had owners and that they were looking for it, Hurtado changed his plans: he contacted the police to make it clear this was not a theft but a find that had brought bad luck on everyone. The painting travelled with him to Murcia and this Wednesday officers are due to collect it from his home, in a municipality near the regional capital, so it can be returned.
Before that, though, there was time for a phone call. Hurtado spoke to the owner of the painting, who confirmed what he already suspected: they had forgotten it in the last-minute rush before setting off for the beach. Grateful, he promised him “a present” for his honesty. For now, the only certainty is that Hurtado will miss out on the auction, but he will walk away with an anecdote that nobody is going to dispute in any bar.
