In early 1993 died Pedro Masaveu Peterson, the man who had accumulated the greatest fortune in the history of Spain, around 350,000 million pesetas which, converted to euros and without applying the effect of inflation, would be more than 2,100 million. His name was (and still is) unknown to most, and even more so his image, because no one would have recognized him on the street (it is known that he was a voluminous man and sported a nineteenth-century beard). To give us an idea of the volume of his assets, it should be known that a few months after his death, another great financier of the time died, Emilio Botín-Sanz de Sautuola y López, president of Banco Santander between 1950 and 1986, and his heirs had to pay half of what the Masaveus had paid for inheritance tax. A tax bill of this amount could not go unnoticed by public administrations, and that is why the autonomous communities of Madrid and Asturias spent more than a decade litigating to keep the prize, in a struggle that the Asturians finally won.