But, frustrated as residents are when the world’s media return to Praia da Luz – year after year at the same time that purple flowers appear on the jacaranda trees – they do understand the unbearable pain that Kate and Gerry McCann must feel.
How that shock of realisation that Madeleine was not in her bed turned into minutes, then hours, and then days of panic. Then tortuous, unending months and years of uncertainty.
For 13 years there was no single theory as to what happened to Madeleine McCann. Did she wake up in the middle of an opportunistic burglary and have to be silenced? Was she abducted on behalf of a couple desperate for a child of their own? Had her own parents covered up her accidental death? (A theory given sufficient weight by Portuguese prosecutors that for a while Kate and Gerry McCann were officially under suspicion.)
The initial Portuguese investigation failed to preserve the scene adequately, so the opportunity to gather forensic evidence from Madeline McCann’s room at the Ocean Club was lost. Long-term residents remember joining in uncoordinated and ad-hoc searches of the town.
The Metropolitan Police investigation that began in 2011 built to a peak in 2014, with substantial searches near Praia da Luz – but they did not appear to have any identifiable suspects.
They had 60 people of interest, 38 of whom they were investigating. Portuguese prosecutors had allowed them to search only one of three sites they had asked for access to.
Everything changed in June 2020 when, out of the blue, the head prosecutor in Braunschweig in Germany, Hans Christian Wolters, said he had evidence that Madeleine McCann was dead.
Working with the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI, he said he had identified a suspect, later identified as Christian Brückner.
“The evidence is strong enough to say that the girl is dead, and to accuse a specific individual of murder,” Hans Christian Wolter said.
Brückner, who spent many years of his life in the Algarve, was a drifter, a petty criminal and a convicted sex offender. It all fitted neatly into place and it seemed that the mystery might finally be solved. Brückner’s long list of previous convictions includes ones for sexually abusing children in 1994 and 2016.