Andrés Hurtado didn’t go to Seville looking for art. He was there for a short break, and on Saturday, at around 4.30 p.m., in the kind of unforgiving heat that gives no respite, he came across something lying on the pavement that caught his eye for the least artistic of reasons: the frame.
“I saw some lads dumping a picture 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,” he told the EFE news agency. He carried it off, literally, in a shopping bag he had just bought at an Asian bazaar, unaware that he had just rescued an original Sorolla which its owners had forgotten in the middle of a lightning-fast move to their beach house.
From suspicion to artificial intelligence
Doubts crept in almost straight away. “With so many replicas and fakes around, I never thought it could be an original Sorolla, but I asked AI and it told me it might be,” 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 turned to artificial intelligence. The answer suggested that it could well be authentic.
Half-convinced, he even sounded out an auction house, which he says was ready to pay him thousands of euros for the piece. The problem was that Hurtado still didn’t know the painting wasn’t “lost” in the romantic sense, but officially reported missing: its owners had already informed the police after realising their mistake on that Seville pavement.
A story with a happy ending
Once he found out the work had owners and that they were looking for it, Hurtado changed his plans: he contacted the police to make it clear this wasn’t a theft but a find that had brought bad luck all round. The painting travelled back with him to Murcia and this Wednesday officers are due to collect it from his home, in a town 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 left it behind in the last-minute rush to head for the beach. Grateful, he promised him “a present” for his honesty. For now, the only sure thing is that Hurtado will miss out on the auction, but he will have a story no one is going to argue with him about in any bar.
