Daily Mail Headline 'After 223 days, Portugal finally turns its back on Madeleine'; says: 'Once they were on every street corner and in every window - the posters which bore the face of the most recognised little girl in the world. But now, seven months on, it seems the town where Madeleine McCann went missing would rather forget her.
The hundreds of posters have vanished entirely from Praia da Luz. The yellow and green ribbons that dangled from trees around the Portuguese resort had been removed.
At the Ocean Club complex, where she went missing on May 3, her poster had been torn from the door. Even the church where Kate and Gerry McCann prayed for their daughter's safe return no longer has her poster on its noticeboard.
With support for the McCanns wavering as they face the prospect of a fresh police interrogation, residents of the town say they cannot bring themselves to display Madeleine's poster when her parents are still considered suspects.
Others said their hopes of finding the missing four-year-old alive had faded and they feared the case had discouraged tourists. It was not clear whether there had been an agreement among the town's businesses to remove the posters and ribbons, or whether individual traders had taken the initiative.
Meri Hanlin, who runs the Harmony health food shop, explained: "It's not that the locals don't care about what happened but they just want to get the village back to how it was. It's so many months on now and when it happened it just ruled everything here. For the locals it just got a little too much."
