1731. Copia de carta de Miguel Serrano de Guzmán, pseudónimo de Salvador Ortiz, fraile, para Juan Maroto del Río, mesonero.

Letter from Miguel Serrano de Guzmán, pseudonym of Salvador Ortiz, a friar, to Juan Maroto del Río, an innkeeper.

Salvador Ortiz informs Juan Maroto del Río that he knows his plan to find a treasure together with Francisco García Visera, because he has intercepted one of their letters. He then proposes to the addressee to collaborate with him in the finding, and gives him new instructions about it.

The defendant of this process was Francisco García Visera, a merchant and a soldier on the galleys. In 1731, he was accused of the crime of witchcraft and superstition by the Inquisition of Cuenca because of various scams he had committed in complicity with a galley slave, the friar Salvador Ortiz. They had proposed the victims of the scams to participate to the finding of a treasure by means of spells. For the realization of these spells they requested certain quantities of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls. The prisoner managed to prove that he did not believe in spells and did not perform magical practices, so eventually he was condemned only for scam. He was forced to abjure de levi in a public auto de fé and sentenced to two hundred lashes and a period of ten years of exile at a distance of ten leagues from Cuenca, Murcia, Cartagena (Murcia), Malaga, Lorca (Murcia), Madrid, Hellín (Albacete), Albacete, Chiva (Valencia) and Almazán (Soria), and to five years of rowing in the galleys.