When a minor Picasso work destined for a museum in the southern Spanish city of Granada went missing this month, locals in a small town sensed a chance to get on the map. A white van containing fine art that was also supposed to hold the Picasso had traveled through the town, parking overnight. Police had even come looking for it.
“We want to create the route of the lost Picasso,” said Patricia Gutiérrez, 49, whose family owns the hotel in Deifontes where the van was parked and its deliverymen slept. “If you come in a white van, we’ll give you a discount.”
But that window is closed. On Friday, after a weekslong nationwide art hunt for Pablo Picasso’s “Still Life With Guitar,” a small gouache and pencil work from 1919, the police announced that they had found it. And law-enforcement officials late Friday said the Picasso had never even left its owner’s building.
Instead, according to a police official who declined to give a name for lack of authorization to publicly discuss details of the case, the painting was apparently supposed to be picked up by a courier inside a private building in northern Madrid, but was instead taken home by a woman who lived in the same building. No one has been charged with any crime.
Officials at the CajaGranada Foundation in Granada said they hoped the piece would now be properly delivered and added to their “Still Life: The Eternity of the Inert” exhibition.
But for a brief moment, the mystery of the missing Picasso infected Deifontes, a sleepy town surrounded by shimmering olive trees about 20 minutes outside Granada, with caper fever. Retirees were spelling out complicated theories. Hotel owners were playing detective, based on the most mundane details. People got even more carried away after last week’s brazen early morning jewel heist at the Louvre in Paris took over the news.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen Deifontes on TV,” said José Martín, 63, a retired farmer who sat earlier this week with three old friends on a bench next to the “Welcome to Deifontes, Land of Fountains,” sign on the road. “Usually the cops are just here for some drug bust. It’s a great area for growing marijuana.”
José Gutiérrez, Ms. Gutiérrez’s father and the owner of the Hostal Rural El Nacimiento, in an interview before it was announced that the Picasso had never made it out of Madrid, was eager to play sleuth and offer his theories. He said he found it “strange” that the two delivery men, who arrived with their van on the evening of Oct. 2, declined his offer to park the white van in the garage, which houses crates of Alhambra beer. They chose instead to leave it on the street, which happened to be out of view of the hotel’s security cameras, he claimed.
He also noted that they turned down his offer of free Cuba libres, something, he said, no one has ever done.
The delivery men who drove the truck and the company they worked for could not be reached for comment.
After a dinner of lamb, pork and chicken, and the special salad, which was basically bacon, the men retired, Mr. Gutiérrez and his daughter recounted. Local news media reported that they told the police that they had slept in shifts to watch the van. Their room was decorated by a still life of three flowers in three vases.
“We’re thinking of renaming it the Picasso room,” Mr. Gutiérrez had said.
In the morning, the deliverymen had toast with more ham and hit the road. It is a roughly 20-minute drive to the CajaGranada Foundation, a contemporary slab of concrete and glass against the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
They made their delivery as scheduled, and left, the museum said, even though the staff realized that some of the packages were incorrectly numbered.
Three days later, at 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 6, foundation staff started unpacking the paintings. At midday, the curator and the exhibit director realized that the Picasso, which was probably going to hang in the cubism section, was missing. They called the cops.
“In 30 years, I have never seen anything like this,” said Miguel Arjona, the exhibit director, who declined otherwise to speak about the investigation.
The authorities eventually traced the deliverymen’s steps back to the hotel, whose lobby is attended by a parrot screeching “Hola! Hola!”
“I wasn’t scared,” said Mr. Gutiérrez, who boasted about feeding military generals and local politicians. “I know half of Spain.”
The police had a look around, inspecting the landscapes and other paintings on the hotel’s walls, including a still life by Juan Roex, a Granada painter who used to pay for his lunches with art works. They didn’t bother to search the room where the men had stayed, Mr. Gutiérrez said, but took the video surveillance footage.
In the meantime, the foundation opened its exhibition. At a recent tour, a guide asked teenagers from a local arts school if they had heard anything about the missing Picasso. She explained it was small.
“Easy to steal,” one of the students, Azahara Dale, 15, said she thought.
As she and the others admired the paintings that the van did deliver, Mr. Arjona showed off what he called the real gems of the exhibit — paintings by 17th-century Flemish masters or Spanish artists like Juan Gris and Antonio López. A security guard kept an eye on it all, expressing relief that the Picasso hadn’t been lost on his watch.
“Thank God,” he said.
Back on the bench in Deifontes, before the police revealed the Picasso’s discovery, Mr. Martín and his friends were puzzling over details of the episode that they couldn’t wrap their heads around.
“Why did they come to the hotel with all that art in the van?” he asked.
He and his pals turned to Manuel Tenorio, 74, a former policeman who held a walking stick on the edge of the bench, for guidance. He looked back at them.
“I’ve been retired for 15 years,” he said, “What the hell do I know?”
José Bautista contributed reporting.
Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief for The Times, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe.
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