Locals in town where Madeleine McCann vanished say no one talks about it anymore

The disappearance of Madeleine McCann has become something ‘nobody talks about’ in the town where she was last seen, it is claimed.

It’s been 15 years since the three-year-old girl disappeared from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in May 2007 as her parents ate at a nearby tapas bar.

Last month police in Portugal named convicted sex offender Christian Brueckner as an official suspect for her murder, in what could be a breakthough for the case.

There may be progress being made, but many locals still don’t want to discuss something that brings back so many painful memories for the area.

‘It’s become the thing that nobody talks about,’ says Praia da Luz restaurant owner Wim Bosman.

He told the Mirror: ’What happened to her is tragic and I cannot imagine what her parents have gone through but it’s part of the past here now.

‘If someone does mention it, it inevitably turns into an argument because people’s opinions differ so wildly.

‘Some blame the parents and say they should never have left her alone, others are full of sympathy for them.’

The South African says that despite all the theories about Maddie’s fate he doesn’t ‘think we will ever know’ the real truth.

Will opened Bosman’s restaurant more than a decade before Maddie went missing on May 3, 2007.

Initially the resort was flooded with journalists, but now tourists are returning and the place no longer carries a stigma of being the ‘place where Maddie visited’.

Will believes most families would have only been put off from visiting for a few months after the disappearance.

‘The resort was hit by the financial crisis and Covid just as much as it was by bad publicity to do with the Maddie case,’ he added.

Even the apartment where Maddie disappeared, on the Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva, is being rented again.

It comes after convicted sex offender Christian Brueckner, 45, was declared an official suspect by Portuguese police last month.

He is already serving a jail sentence for raping a 72-year-old American woman in 2005 in a separate case and was reportedly denied parole by German authorities.

Brueckner has been renting a farmhouse on the edge of Praia da Luz for years before Maddie’s disappearance, although he moved out one year before she vanished.

It is now owned by a British national who is ‘sick and tired’ of people gawping at it out of morbid curiosity.

The property has been renovated since Brueckner lived there. The property owner added: ‘Nobody in the resort wants to talk about Madeleine or the guy they think took her, it’s just not spoken about.

‘He was living in a camper van when she went missing, not here.’

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