I found £47k stuffed into the walls of my new home… but a brutal rule meant I lost HALF the money
A SPANISH man couldn’t believe his luck when he found a stash of cash hidden in the walls of his house.
Builder Toño Piñeiro was carrying out construction work on his new home in Spain when he stumbled across several rotting Nesquik cans, filled to the brim with banknotes.
The house had been abandoned for over four decades when Toño spotted it for sale on Facebook.
He revealed that as soon he got to work clearing out the rubble in 2021, he found two Nesquik cans containing five million pesetas.
Hardly believing his luck, Toño rushed to call the Bank of Spain to exchange his new fortune, and received an eye-watering 30,000 euros in return.
“It paid for a new roof”, Toño told the newspaper El Progreso.
But when he found six Nesquik cans filled with nine million pesatas, his luck waned.
This would have been the equivalent of £47,500, but half of the notes he found in his haul were so old that they could no longer be exchanged for euros.
Toño was told he that the deadline to exchange these notes was June 2021, and that the Bank of Spain had simply stopped accepting older notes.
He said: “I called them, but they told me that it was no longer possible.”
Toño also said that the news initially sent him into a “rage”, but he has since come to accept his bad luck.
Half of the notes were accepted by the bank, he has decided to keep some as souvenirs, and the rest he is trying to sell to collectors.
He even went on to praise the condition they were kept in.
He said: “I guess they kept these containers to avoid humidity.
“The last ones were somewhat damaged, but the others weren’t – they were ironed, it was incredible.”
According to locals, the house was formerly owned by Manuel do Xentes – who was employed at the Canabal brick factory and engaged in cattle trading.
Manuel passed away without any heirs, and over 40 years later, his fortune has been unexpectedly found within the walls of his house.
Locals also mentioned that Manuel had a habit of placing banknotes in different pieces of farm machinery, which he would inadvertently sell without realising.
The peseta was phased out after Spain adopted the euro in 2002.
The Bank of Spain reckons some 1.6billion euros worth of old notes and coins were not exchanged before the deadline.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened though.
In April of last year, a Reddit user shared a mystery discovery of a giant red bucket filled to the brim with copper coins in their late grandfather’s house.
The late-man who was born in 1929 reportedly “lived a simple life on a farm during the Depression and aftermath.”
The user said that their grandfather “did not need a traditional credit card”, and that the only “credit” he knew was “the family tab at the grain store.”
It remains unclear how much money was hidden around the house.
One Reddit user commented: “Check the walls. My uncle found 160 million in pre euro currency (about 4 million USD worth) in my grandparents walls.
“Took quite some effort to get it converted.”
However, another commenter’s friend seemed to share in Toño’s woes regarding hidden cash.
The user wrote: “A friend of mine got f****** by something like this.
“His grandma died, and she had been stashing money everywhere, they found about 150k USD in Swedish kronor.
“Problem was, they were all in the since then replaced 500 kr bills, which were no longer legal tender, and since they had no way of showing that it came from legal income, they weren’t allowed to swap them out since too much time had passed.”