TOR, España — Life in the 13-house Pyrenean village of Tor has always been so simple that newcomers have struggled to find an open place for a clothesline, where a decade ago three border collies and two shepherds would have played nightly soccer until it was too dark to see. What started as a journalist’s decades-long investigation into an unsolved 1995 killing has made Tor Spain’s unofficial “true-crime capital” and left many neighbours wondering how much more attention they can take, Dec. 8, 2025
Every summer, tourists grind up the track from the valley in four-wheel drives, purchasing “smugglers’ route” trips that promise contraband paths, grim crime scenes, and sweeping views out toward Andorra. One operator, best known as Glencoe Legendary Experience, also sells a “Smugglers’ Route, Village of Tor” tour that twists the village’s history of violence into an adventure for thrill-seekers.
For locals, that fascination is part of a grim story. In the 1990s, a generations-old fight over who owned Tor’s mountain — and the lucrative smuggling routes across it — resulted in three killings during a 15-year period, the last that of Sansa himself, a 70-year-old man named Josep Montané who died only months after a judge declared him its sole owner. The crime has never been solved, and under Spanish law, the case is now prescribed, with no one able to be prosecuted, even if they confess.
How Carles Porta transformed Tor into a true-crime story
Carles Porta was a young TV3 reporter in the mid-1990s when he first travelled to Tor, which, driven by the feud and killings, was quickly turned into what would become a now-legendary 30 Minutes documentary “Tor, la muntanya maleïda” (“Tor, the cursed mountain”), repromoted recently by Catalan public broadcaster 3Cat. That broadcast was the inspiration for his 2005 nonfiction book, Tor. Tretze cases i tres morts (Thirteen Cases and Three Deaths), which helped broaden the investigation and went on to become a benchmark of Catalan narrative journalism, was praised at first read by reviews such as this one from 2013 on a literary blog.
Throughout the years, Carles Porta kept revisiting the case; he put out a hit podcast re-examining the story in 2018 and, in an interview with VilaWeb in 2017, even claimed that he thought he knew who had killed Sansa — although he has never identified the suspect. Local media regularly resurrected the original TV report; one such, by Pallars Digital in 2019, urged audiences to “recover” the 1997 film and sparked fresh waves of listeners — and then viewers — who kept discovering Tor’s dark legend.
Porta, now one of Spain’s best-known investigative TV and radio reporters—thanks to hit shows like Crims—has developed a wide-ranging narrative non-fiction career, as described in his bio. For nearly 30 years, the story of Tor has remained the spine of his work: an obsession he has explored on the page, in podcasts, and on screen.
Streaming hits turn up the spotlight on Tor.
The newest instalment is an opulent eight-part TV documentary, “Tor,” made for Catalan public broadcaster 3Cat and the Barcelona-based company Ikiru Films, that relies on footage and testimony gathered over nearly 30 years. Billed as the definitive visual account of the feud — and murders — it comes to Spanish screens at a time when true-crime is already one of the most popular genres on streaming services.
The story has since gone beyond Catalonia. The national streaming service Atresplayer, for instance, hails “Tor” as a show that will “mark a before and after” in Spanish true crime and trumpets its record-breaking premiere of a documentary on the platform — compelling evidence of how vividly Carles Porta’s investigation now speaks to mass audiences.
Residents of Spain’s ‘true-crime capital’ have their say.
With each new format, more and more fans come along. A recent New York Times feature — picked up in a 3Cat news item — touts Tor as Spain’s “true-crime capital” and describes tourists posing with electrical cables looped around their necks or knocking on the former home of Sansa as if it were an escape room. Some villagers are happy with the money, but many grumble about trespassing, blocked tracks, and the constant sense that someone is watching them go about their ordinary lives.
These days, guides take visitors down historic smuggling paths and past houses where previous deaths occurred. Sansa’s former home has been repurposed as a small exhibition called the “Tor Experience,” complete with crime-scene re-enactments and souvenirs. Locals interviewed in recent coverage say they would gladly exchange the income from souvenirs for improvements such as a cell-phone mast, less traffic, fewer strangers in their yards, and especially a return to the obscurity of previous decades.
Can Carles Porta’s avid followers and Tor’s villagers agree on anything?
(And, indeed, Porta has insisted that his work is an anthropological way of comprehending violence and society rather than a glamorous portrayal of it, telling one Andorran outlet that crime stories provide “a portrait of our society,” no mere shocked thrill.) His success in print, audio, and television shows how difficult it is to control what happens once a true-crime narrative takes off into the wider culture, becoming integrated into a tourism economy he doesn’t directly manage.
Some residents and local guides now say that the only conceivable way forward is to direct visitors’ interest in a more responsible direction: clearer rules for respecting private property, capped group sizes and tours emphasising the valley’s wider history — from high-mountain farming to cross-border trade — rather than its grislier chapter. Others just hope that once Carles Porta finally presents what he describes as the “last chapter” of Tor, fascination will eventually wane. His recent book Tor. Foc encès, which returns again and again to the case and its unfinished business, seems to indicate that neither he nor his readers is prepared to let the story die.
In the meantime, Tor still bears the stamp of its own myth. The mountains are still beautiful, cows continue to graze alongside icy streams, and the road that still fills each summer with fans seeking out the story Carles Porta turned into Spain’s longest-running true-crime saga.
