A British man and woman, aged 82 and 74, were found dead in a house in the municipality of San Fulgencio (Alicante) on Thursday. There were no signs of violence, according to sources close to the probe. The first probes to find out what happened with the deaths have been led by the Territorial Team of the Judicial Police of the Guardia Civil in Almoradí.

Both were found by a Red Cross team at noon in a house in the La Marina housing area, which is mostly made up of British people. As part of an agreement with the town hall of San Fulgencio, they had been keeping an eye on them for a few weeks. The agreement, called the Municipal Comprehensive Emergency System (SIREM), is meant to help old people who live alone in this town in the far south of Alicante.

Sources say that they are not a married couple but rather friends who lived together and had medical problems, which is why social services were taking care of them while they were waiting for their identities to be confirmed.

A Red Cross spokeswoman told EFE that when the organisation visited this couple on January 18, they found that the man had fallen and needed help getting up. They also learnt that they both lived with a dog and had symptoms of long-term illnesses and trouble moving around.

The situation was reported to the city’s social services, which stepped up their tracking along with the humanitarian organisation. The monitoring continued until this Thursday, when two members of a health team that does social work went to the house but were met with silence when they knocked on the door.

A partially open window caught their attention, and when they looked inside, they saw feet on the floor. Following the action plan, they called the San Fulgencio local police and the fire department to come and check out the house.
A forensic evaluation will be done.

When they got inside, they saw one of the bodies on the floor and the other on one of the beds. The case was given to the Civil Guard of the nearby town of Guardamar del Segura until the people in charge of the Orihuela court on duty could take the bodies away.

The bodies of the two people who died have been taken to the Institute of Legal Medicine in Alicante so that, in the next few hours, a forensic test can be done to find out how they died and confirm their identities.

People think that San Fulgencio is one of the medium-sized towns in Spain with the most British residents because, out of a population of about 10,000, there are about 3,000 English people living there and only 2,800 Spanish people. This is mostly because of La Marina and Oasis, another nearby macro-urbanization.