18 May 2018, Alberto Perez Cedillo

The millionaire inheritance from an unknown

An elderly woman from Barcelona leaves 8.3 million euros to the University of Vic and Cáritas for student scholarships and to help the elderly.

It was a huge surprise for the University of Vic and Cáritas when they received the news that a woman named María Victoria Modolell Trias had left them an inheritance of 8.3 million euros. They had never heard of her before. Coincidentally, that same week, on May 6, The New York Times published a profile of Sylvia Bloom, an anonymous secretary from a law firm in New York who donated an inheritance of 8.2 million dollars when she died at the age of 96 years old. The two women are united by anonymity and have left a legacy of millions for a good cause.

Modolell was born in 1937 in Barcelona and died at the age of 80 in 2017. The two institutions to which she donated the 8.3 million euros must jointly manage these assets and profits, investing in that specified by Modolell: scholarships for students of higher education at the university and aid for elderly and minors with few resources tended to by Cáritas.