Moncloa expone planos del despacho de Bolaños en un contrato público

A routine contract for climate control work at Spain's presidential complex has exposed something far more sensitive: detailed architectural blueprints, interior layouts, and aerial photographs of the office where the government's second-most powerful figure conducts his daily work. The discovery has alarmed national security experts who reviewed the 861-page tender document that Moncloa uploaded to the public procurement portal.

The contract itself was straightforward enough. In mid-June, the presidential administration budgeted roughly 641,000 euros for energy efficiency upgrades and geothermal climate improvements to two buildings: the Annexe IV structure and the Vice President's building. By August 12, the work had been awarded to Elecnor for just over 603,000 euros after the company's bid was selected from three competing proposals. The Vice President's building, constructed in 2006 and inaugurated by María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, was approaching two decades old and due for modernization.

But the tender documents contained far more than specifications for pipes and cooling systems. They laid bare the internal architecture of the building where Félix Bolaños, the Minister of the Presidency, conducts the business of governing alongside Pedro Sánchez. The papers describe a structure with a semi-basement level and four above-ground floors—ground level, first, second, and attic—complete with precise square footage measurements for each. The semi-basement houses storage, archives, technical rooms, and multipurpose meeting spaces. The four upper floors are devoted entirely to offices. The documents even specify that access occurs via the southern facade.

The level of technical detail extends further still. The tender describes the building's complete climate control system in granular terms: units assisted by four-tube water circuits, thermal counters in the machine room that track energy consumption down to the megawatt-hour. In 2023 alone, the building consumed 137 megawatt-hours of heating and 60 of cooling. The new geothermal system will be installed in the machine room itself, integrated with existing heat and cold distribution networks and control systems, with the goal of reducing carbon emissions and non-renewable energy consumption by roughly 22 percent, moving the building's energy rating from D to C.

None of this would be remarkable in an ordinary government building. But this is not an ordinary building. It houses the office of the minister with the most influence in the Spanish executive after the president himself. And security experts who reviewed the documents expressed something between bewilderment and alarm. "It's absurd, a monumental security error," one national security specialist told The Objective after reading the published specifications. "It's a monumental mistake from the standpoint of security for the presidential complex."

The most troubling element, experts agree, is not the architectural detail but the aerial imagery. The tender documents include high-resolution overhead photographs of the entire Moncloa complex—the presidential residence, the palace where cabinet meetings occur and foreign leaders are received, the surrounding grounds. These images are precise enough to be useful. They are also now public. Any foreign intelligence service with interest in Spanish government operations—and there are several—now possesses a detailed map of the physical layout, access points, and internal organization of one of Europe's most sensitive government buildings. The path from that knowledge to placing a listening device in Bolaños's office is shorter than it should be.