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now closer to the capital. In terms of education and culture, we have 70 teaching centres and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos campus, four theatres, a library for every 35,000 inhabitants, six sports centres, a basketball team playing in the ACB (the top division of Spanish basketball) and a football team in the third division.
    ‘It’s a city, and a very different one from that which Fernando knew when he was small. His neighbourhood, the Parque Granada, at that time was almost a village, where everyone knew each other and where the majority of people had arrived only a short time before. If there’s something that hasn’t changed, it’s the fact that Fuenlabrada continues to be one of the youngest municipalities in the country.’
    José Torres – Pepe to his friends – arrived in this ‘dormitory city’, 22 kilometres (about 14 miles) from Madrid in the 1980s from Galicia. He was born less than 20 kilometres from Santiago de Compostela, the regional capital. José is the second of nine children of Claudio Torres and Maruja. ‘Our Pepe, who is now 59, began at the army barracks in Pontevedra and later joined the police. He wasdeputy-inspector and after two years in the Basque Country, he requested to be transferred to Madrid, to Fuenlabrada (a new station was opened in 1987). Now he’s retired,’ recalled Claudio Torres recently. In Madrid, he married Flori, who is from the city, and bought an apartment in the street of Calle Alemania. It’s here that their three children were born and grew up. Mari Paz, the oldest and eight years Fernando’s senior, has a law degree and today works for Bahía International. Israel, seven years older than Fernando, has followed in his father’s footsteps. He joined the police and was assigned to the security of María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, the deputy prime minister in the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
    ‘My parents weren’t expecting me. I arrived by chance,’ confessed El Niño some years ago. His brother and sister were already quite grown-up when the new arrival made his entrance. Attention centres on the little Fernando José Torres Sanz who, despite the normal petty jealousies, is welcomed by his two older siblings. In fact, Flori and José say that, with the arrival of Fernando, the older two become more settled.
    The most amusing anecdote from those early years is the fright his mother gets when he throws around 80,000 pesetas (about £400 at today’s values) out of the window. He was playing with a model toy in his parents’ bedroom. A lorry with a big trailer. He’d filled it with banknotes he’d found in a drawer and then … threw it out of the window. He liked to drop things to see where they ended up. Flori, working round-the-clock to look after the three children, had begun searching for the cash but couldn’t find it and had run out of places to look for it. She was desperate. She only realised what had happened when the neighbours knocked on the door to ask: ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen what’s fallen out of your window?’ She couldn’t imagine that her little ‘Fer’,as his friends call him, had done such a thing. El Niño was a bit naughty both in and outside the house. So much so that José and Flori decide, in a family meeting, to impose tough measures to prevent any more such ‘brilliant’ ideas on Fernando’s part.
    Even if he is the little one of the house, he can’t get away with everything. He has to be subject to the same rules as the other two. Having said that, his brother and sister still allow Fernando to get up to all sorts of mischief. Israel, his older brother, is the model, the example to follow, while Mari Paz is the older sister who indulges him in everything and who makes a fuss of him whenever she can. The friends of the family say that Fernando has his father’s character, the character of the shy, almost introvert, gallegos (people from Galicia) but who are at the same time, good,