Iglesia de San Eutropio, Paradas

On Christmas Eve 2025, thieves forced the side door of the sacristy of San Eutropio, the parish church of Paradas, a farming town east of Seville. They left with a Penitent Magdalene they believed was by El Greco, the Cretan-born painter of Toledo. What they took was the copy hung for visitors. The original, painted in the 1580s by most accounts, was in the same building behind a grille and its own alarm.

Nobody knows for certain how the picture reached Paradas. One suggestion is that it came to the Seville area through Francisco Preboste, El Greco's closest assistant, and some scholars see workshop help in it. It has travelled to exhibitions in Athens, Toledo and Aragón, and in January 2026 it was moved to Seville Cathedral, to be shown there and kept safe while the church is restored.

The church itself was rebuilt at the end of the 18th century and consecrated in 1791, a five-aisled building in late Sevillian Baroque edging into Neoclassicism. The Magdalene's usual home is the small museum set up in its sacristy in 1968, among old chalices, insignia of the town's former brotherhoods and a 17th-century enamel.