Real estate in big cities often costs an arm and a leg -- but an unemployed woman in Spain is taking the saying quite literally, selling all of her non-vital organs to pay rent, the Spanish daily El Mundo reported on Monday.
"I've got nothing. The only thing I have are my organs," the 44-year-old woman told the newspaper in a video interview, according to a HuffPost translation. The woman explained she is on the verge of being evicted by her ex-partner and sees no other way to raise money to provide for herself and her daughter.
According to El Mundo, the woman previously posted her offer on the internet. She reiterates in the video: "I first offered a kidney for sale, and now I also offer my corneas, one of my lungs, a piece of my liver... I'll sell whatever organ of my body to whoever can pay."
El Mundo did not reveal the woman's full identity, and HuffPost could not verify her story independently. According to the Spanish periodical, no one has accepted the woman's proposal yet.
The story came to light the same day Spanish banks announced they would halt some evictions of homeowners who failed to pay their mortgages. The banks had felt public pressure following the suicides of two people facing eviction in as many weeks.
On Friday, a 53-year-old woman jumped to her death in Spain's northern city of Bilbao as she faced being forced from her home, the Associated Press wrote. On Oct. 25, Jose Miguel Domingo was found dead in the courtyard of his apartment building in the southern city of Granada. He plunged to his death moments after bailiffs appeared to evict him from his home.
Spain is battling its second recession in three years, the AP explains, and government projections estimate the economy will not grow until 2014. Numbers released by the country's National Statistics Institute at the end of October indicated that 5.78 million people, or 25 percent of Spaniards, are currently unemployed.
Watch El Mundo's interview in Spanish in the video above.
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