Nginx default root returns 404 on port 80

I have a problem when trying to reach my server only via the IP on port 80.

If I go to the IP I get the nginx 404 error page.

This is what my default config looks like:

# You may add here your
# server {
#       ...
# }
# statements for each of your virtual hosts to this file


server {
        listen    80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
        #listen   [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
        # Document root
        root /var/www/default;
        index index.html index.htm;

        # Make site accessible from http://localhost/
        server_name localhost;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to index.html
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
                # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location
                # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules
        }

        location /doc/ {
                alias /usr/share/doc/;
                autoindex on;
                allow 127.0.0.1;
                deny all;
        }

        # Only for nginx-naxsi : process denied requests
        #location /RequestDenied {
                # For example, return an error code
                #return 418;
        #}

        #error_page 404 /404.html;

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
        #location = /50x.html {
        #       root /usr/share/nginx/www;
        #}

        # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
        #
        #location ~ \.php$ {
        #       fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        #       # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini
        #
        #       # With php5-cgi alone:
        #       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        #       # With php5-fpm:
        #       fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        #       fastcgi_index index.php;
        #       include fastcgi_params;
        #}

        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        #location ~ /\.ht {
        #       deny all;
        #}
}

Inside the /var/www/default there is a file named index.html. Now to the weird part. If I change the listen port to 8888 nginx serves the index.html correctly. I only have 3 sites and the other ones are virtual hosts, so they don't have a listen directive. I've set the /var/www/default folder to chmod 777 just for now, still returns 404 on port 80.

Edit:
I've checked the error log of nginx and this was stated:
2014/04/08 09:30:21 [error] 3349#0: *1 "/etc/nginx/html/index.html" is not found

The question then begs, where is this config that says that /etc/nginx/html/index.html is the default root?