ELMYR DE HORY
One of the most notorious artists to reside in Torremolinos was Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born painter and art forger that lived in the town during the late 1960s.
Elmyr de Hory is said to have sold over one thousand forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world: in 1946, he sold a pen and ink drawing to a British woman who mistook it for an original work by Picasso.
By the 1960s, de Hory's paintings were being revealed as forgeries and so he lived in several different countries to avoid being arrested by both the FBI and Interpol. In 1966, he went to live on Ibiza, but two years later he was arrested on charges of homosexuality and spent two months in prison. On his release, he was expelled from Ibiza and so he headed to the notorious bohemian scene in Torremolinos. The great counterfeiter found everything he needed in Torremolinos and would probably have settled there permanently, but the blatant homosexuality and debauchery soon forced the police to clampdown and this ended with hundreds of foreigners being deported from Spain.
Facing possible extradition to France on forgery charges, and tired of having to continually evade arrest, Elmyr de Hory returned to Ibiza in the early '70s, where he took his own life with an overdose of barbiturates in December 1976.