[dave6x]

A cautionary tale!

In 2003 we rented a rather nice country villa near Cala San Vicente in north east of Mallorca. It had a wall mounted key operated safe inside a cupboard and so we thought it would be useful to place some of our valuables in there for safe keeping. One evening we went out to a restaurant to celebrate the birthday of one of our party and on our return we found the villa had been broken into, the safe had been crow-barred or jemmied off the wall and then jemmied open and all contents stolen. Interestingly nothing else in the villa appeared to have been touched despite there being cameras and even a wallet and other valuables in other rooms, only the safe was targetted.

We were lucky in that only my wife's passport was in the safe at that time, but that was together with around 600-700 euros in cash and travellers cheques and some credit cards. We stopped the credit cards and American Express replaced the travellers cheques (always keep the numbers seperate as we did!) but there was considerable time and expense to make the police report through an interpreter and to obtain a temporary passport to get my wife home!

As I said, only the safe was targetted and despite being bolted to the wall had been removed and broken into, had it been a better quality safe it could easily have been taken away by the thieves and opened with an angle grinder at their leisure!

Beware of "placing all your eggs in one basket" as the saying goes!!!