Hi all, I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with towing policies in Spain. A couple months back, I took a trip to Alicante, rented a car, and the next day drove to Murcia. I parked about 1 km from the city center, starred the location on Google Maps, walked into town, and returned about an hour later to find that the car had vanished. I checked Google Maps history, which confirmed where I had parked (the point where it said I had stopped driving and started walking). I also trawled through photos I had taken with my phone; the very first one was of a car parked crookedly a couple spaces down from mine.
Nonetheless, I began wandering the neighborhood, thinking maybe I had made a mistake. After a while, not seeing anything, I began to panic, and started asking people in the area if they had seen or heard anything because at this point I figured the car had been stolen. One local told me that if a car is parked illegally, it may get towed to a nearby legal space, rather than to an impound lot, so he said it was possible it could end up a few blocks from where I had left it. He mentioned that I should look for a yellow paper on the ground with a rock on top in the original parking space (presumably a parking ticket with info as to where the car has been taken). This struck me as an odd (not to mention confusing) practice, but I'm curious if anyone else has heard of or experienced this. I didn't notice any signage to indicate that where I parked was a reserved space, but it's possible it was reserved for residents. I did notice that different spaces had lines in different colors, but no signage to explain the significance of these colors. Incidentally, I didn't find any note in the space where I remember parking.
In the end, I couldn't find the car, so I walked to the nearest police station and reported it stolen. Now, two months later, the rental office has notified me that the police recovered the vehicle a few blocks away from where I reported that I had parked, and said there were no signs of forced entry. As a result, I'm taken back to the man's comment about cars being moved, and wondering if there is any truth to it.
