The Royal Club Náutico, in the resort of Sanxenxo, a curving strip of white sand beach on Spain’s Galician coast, is a major stop on the international sailboat racing circuit. But the hundreds of journalists who mobbed the port on May 20 hadn’t come to admire the yachts competing in the 2022 Spanish Cup. The object of their attention was an octogenarian sailor sporting salmon-colored chinos and a pink baseball cap: Spain’s former king, Juan Carlos I. Having abdicated the throne in 2014, then gone into exile under pressure from his son, King Felipe VI, in 2020, he had chosen this moment for his first trip home from his current residence, an islet off the coast of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.
The Casa Real, as the Spanish royal house is known, hadn’t wanted Juan Carlos to come home at all. “He’s seen as a burden,” says José María Irujo, an investigative reporter for El País, Spain’s largest newspaper, who exposed a series of suspicious gifts to Juan Carlos from billionaire benefactors that were funneled over the years into secret bank accounts, including one belonging to his socialite mistress. An investigation into his finances by Swiss prosecutors, launched in 2018, ended in December 2021 with no charges filed. Three months later Spanish prosecutors dropped their own probe, citing “a lack of incriminating evidence, the statute of limitations, [and] the inviolability of the head of state.”
Now that Juan Carlos was no longer in legal jeopardy, he was free to come and go as he pleased. But in an era of ever greater skepticism and debate about the need for monarchies—are they potent symbols of national continuity or expensive petri dishes of familial dysfunction?—he is still regarded as toxic, an object lesson, some would say, in how a monarch, current or former, should not behave. Felipe and his chief of staff, Jaime Alfonsín Alonso, wanted Juan Carlos to steer clear of the media, Spanish journalists who cover the monarchy say, and begin his five-day visit by paying his respects at Madrid’s Zarzuela Palace, the royal residence since Juan Carlos took the throne in 1975. Additionally, the compromised ex-king would agree not to stay overnight at Zarzuela.
But Juan Carlos did nothing to discourage the press, according to El País, known for its progressive and traditionally pro–Juan Carlos views. And he spent much of his excursion in Sanxenxo in the company of cronies such as yacht club president Pedro Campos; he visited Felipe at Zarzuela only at the tail end of the trip. “Juan Carlos was in Zarzuela for 11 hours, and for four of those Felipe had a meeting with him, saying how terrible it was that he had brought along all this press,” says Jaime Peñafiel, Spain’s most prominent celebrity journalist, who has known Juan Carlos for 60 years.
“His attitude is, ‘Nobody tells me what to do.’ His friends say that he is an electron libre—a free molecule.”
Many Spaniards appear to share their current king’s exasperation with his father. “People are angry…and disappointed,” says Alvaro de Cozar, producer of a popular 12-part podcast about Juan Carlos, XRey, which dives into his rise, downfall, and complex relationship with his only son. “A small bunch of loyalists will always be there, as will those who believe that dark forces are out to destroy Juan Carlos and the monarchy. But there’s not a huge crowd waiting for the king to return.”
Irujo, for one, isn’t surprised by Juan Carlos’s desire to force his way back into Spain: “His attitude is, ‘Nobody tells me what to do.’ His friends say that he is an electron libre—a free molecule.” The former king’s attitude seemed perfectly captured at a regatta in Sanxenxo on May 21, when he boarded the yacht he had skippered to victory at the Spanish Cup three years earlier. Its name? El Bribon: “the Rascal.”
It is hard to exaggerate the impact Juan Carlos had on Spain—and the world—over two generations. Born in exile during the Spanish Civil War, he oversaw Spain’s transformation from a fascist dictatorship into a democracy. He thwarted a cabal of right-wing putschists determined to drag the country back to an era of torture, repression, and isolation. He guided Spain into the 21st century, overseeing its joining NATO and the European Economic Community. And he provided a raison d’être for constitutional monarchies, acting as an honest broker between political parties and presiding over an era of stability.
Had Juan Carlos acted with the modesty and consistency of his distant cousin, Queen Elizabeth, Spain’s monarchy might well be seen the way Britain’s is, as a revered institution in a cynical age. Instead, his tawdry decline now threatens to consign the Borbóns to the trash heap of history—along with the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, and other defunct dynasties. His fall from grace exemplifies the challenges royals face in an era of intense social media scrutiny—and the public’s waning appetite for self-indulgence among the wealthy. The affection showered on Elizabeth at her Platinum Jubilee was a reminder of the benefits to society that royalty can bring: a sense of unity, an infusion of glamour and pageantry. But it has also become clear that the British monarchy is an outlier, with an increasing number of people calling these institutions a waste of taxpayers’ money, symbols of elitism in a republican era.
“What we Spaniards see is that the British are very proud of their monarchy, despite its troubles,” says de Cozar, of XRey. He attributes that to the towering, indomitable, stoic presence of Elizabeth—who was willing last February to strip her favorite son, Andrew, the Duke of York, of his privileges to maintain the throne’s dignity. By contrast the history of the Borbóns, he says, is peppered with monarchs who let down their country: Carlos IV, who surrendered the throne to Napoleon in 1808; Fernando VII, who abolished the constitution in 1814 and had the liberal promulgators arrested; and now Juan Carlos I, who was gallivanting around Sanxenxo with his pals, oblivious to the symbolism of his erstwhile office, while Elizabeth was quietly celebrating her jubilee at home.
The troubles run deeper than Juan Carlos’s gallivanting. “This is a completely dysfunctional family,” a financial adviser to the Spanish elite, acquaintance of royals, and member of the board of several major Spanish companies tells me, as we sit in his office in a wealthy Madrid neighborhood a stone’s throw from the Prado. He cites the broken marriage of Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía, the Greek-born great-granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II and great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria; a daughter, Cristina, tainted by her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, who in 2018 was sentenced to almost six years in prison for fraud, tax crimes, and embezzling millions; and the son, Felipe, protective of his mother and the crown, burning with indignation at his father’s recklessness.
The two men barely exchanged a word, sources say, between the day Juan Carlos departed Spain in August 2020 and his return to Zarzuela 22 months later. “The father feels betrayed by his son,” the adviser tells me, “and the son is terrified that the father’s association with corruption will fatally weaken the monarchy.” Indeed, the tortured relationship between Juan Carlos and Felipe parallels to an uncanny degree the one between Juan Carlos and his own father, Don Juan. That drama ended, Shakespearean style, with the father in exile and the son elevated to power. This one is playing out with the father in exile as well—and the son as quite possibly the last king of Spain.
Madrid’s Palacio Real, the Royal Palace, begun in 1738 by the first Borbón king of Spain, Philip V, is one of the most magnificent edifices in Europe, filled with crystal chandeliers, Renaissance tapestries, Chinese porcelains, and frescoes depicting Columbus and the conquistadors. All of it is meant to convey the power, dignity, and continuity of the Borbón dynasty. In fact, beneath the opulence and grandeur, the Borbóns’ hold on the throne of Spain has been fragile. The dynasty came to an abrupt (and seemingly final) end in 1931, when a left-wing coalition government, known as the Second Republic, was voted into power. The Republicans forced Alfonso XIII, Juan Carlos’s grandfather, into exile (although he did not abdicate) and confiscated his palaces. Alfonso, his English wife, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), and their children settled in Rome, where Juan Carlos was born in 1938, one year before the fascist leader Francisco Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War against Republican forces. Juan Carlos’s father, Don Juan, was Alfonso’s third son and designated heir.
Soon after his father’s death, in 1941, Don Juan moved with his family to the small coastal town of Estoril in Portugal, a playground for exiled monarchs (including King Umberto of Italy and Carol I of Romania). Ensconced in a villa overlooking the Atlantic, Don Juan, an Anglophile who had served in the British Royal Navy as an exiled prince, and his family lived comfortably but looked upon their cousins the Windsors with envy, a nagging discontent that would shadow Juan Carlos throughout his life. (The vast financial gulf between them persists to this day. The British royal family holds $88 billion in assets, including palaces and duchies. The Borbóns, who never regained the properties they lost in 1931, are worth an estimated $2.3 billion.) “Don Juan depended on the charity of rich supporters,” says the noted British historian and expert on modern Spain Paul Preston. And despite a life of leisure, “as a child, Juan Carlos perceived himself as dirt poor.”
The story might have ended there—one more deposed European monarchy fading into genteel obscurity—but Franco gave the Borbóns a new shot at glory. To shore up his popularity among the sizable monarchist constituency, Franco decided to restore the dynasty to the throne—provided they kept Spain an authoritarian state. In 1948 he and Don Juan made a deal: Don Juan would send Juan Carlos, then just 10 years old, to live near the dictator in Madrid, with the apparent expectation that Don Juan would become king after Franco’s death and Juan Carlos would be groomed to succeed him. Off went the young prince to live in a palace north of Madrid, surrounded by tutors who indoctrinated him in Franco’s fascist ideology, including the belief that the military has the God-given right to decide on the politics of Spain. Military school followed in 1954, when Juan Carlos was 16. He made friends there essentially for the first time, Preston says, but the period was also scarred by tragedy.
During a sojourn at home in Portugal when he was 18, he and his 14-year-old brother, Alfonso, were cleaning a pistol when the gun went off, killing Alfonso. No one ever knew for sure who actually pulled the trigger. Juan Carlos would never publicly discuss the event, and one can only speculate about how the horror affected the family—and the relationship between Don Juan and his surviving son.
In 1969 Franco informed Juan Carlos that he, not his father, would become the next Borbón king, creating an unhealable rift between Don Juan and Juan Carlos. Franco had come to suspect Don Juan of having pro-democratic sympathies and expected Juan Carlos to be a pliable figurehead. (The historian José Alvarez Junco, who studied law with Juan Carlos at the University of Madrid in the early 1960s, described him to me as “tall, very blond, and shy, [making] no impression.”) “What monarchy are you saving?” Don Juan wrote scathingly to his son after receiving a letter from him asking for his blessing. “A monarchy that is against your father? You have saved nothing.”
Franco was mistaken about his protégé. Juan Carlos, who was crowned two days after the dictator’s death in November 1975, recognized that Spain needed to break from Franco’s economically stagnant and brutal autocracy, under which opponents were still being tortured, even murdered. “By little tweaks,” Preston says, he changed the country: holding a successful referendum on democratic reforms, legalizing political parties, and presiding over the writing of the 1978 constitution, which turned Spain into a constitutional monarchy.
Then came the moment that would cement Juan Carlos’s place in history—and, his critics say, give him a free pass on his behavior for the next three decades. On February 23, 1981, 200 right-wing troops opposed to the reforms stormed the Legislative Assembly, taking the government hostage. José Bono, who was later Spain’s minister of defense but was a young parliamentarian at the time, recalls “sitting awake through the night” in his seat in the legislative chamber, “fearing for my life.” Juan Carlos began phoning military officers around the country, urging them not to support the coup, and hours later, assured of their support, he went on television, denouncing the plotters and pledging his support to the government.
“Juan Carlos saved our democracy,” Bono tells me. Basking in the afterglow, the king traveled across Spain in the 1980s and ’90s with Sofía, building support for the monarchy among a new generation. He guided Spain through years of rapid economic growth, promoted Spanish businesses abroad, and served highly effectively as the country’s goodwill ambassador. Charming and photogenic, he seemed the model of what a modern European constitutional monarch could be.
The Borbón line, however, unlike the Windsors, had suffered a traumatic 20th-century interruption—and never regained ownership of confiscated properties. And Juan Carlos had expensive appetites, requiring far more than the $240,000 that he received as an annual stipend for personal expenses from the Spanish state—one of the paltriest allotments of any European monarchy. (This money is in addition to the tens of millions of euros the monarchy receives from the state for public expenditures, including palace upkeep, receptions, and official visits abroad—which is still far less than what the Windsors receive.) Early in his reign, according to Preston, Juan Carlos charged the late Manuel Prado y Colón de Carvajal, a powerful diplomat businessman, with finding ways of raising money from wealthy Spaniards.
But his biggest financial backers, say close observers, were Arab leaders. He had a close relationship with Saudi Arabian royalty—a relationship that began, says Peñafiel, during the 1973 oil embargo, when Franco sent 35-year-old Juan Carlos, the king-in-waiting, to Riyadh to cajole King Faisal into providing petroleum products at a reasonable price. King Mohammed VI of Morocco, the emir of Kuwait, the Al Nahyan sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, and the King of Bahrain also considered themselves close friends. Some felt a special kinship with Juan Carlos, Irujo believes, viewing him “as a living link to the territorio perdido, the ‘lost kingdom’ ”—a reference to the Iberian Peninsula when it was controlled by Muslims during the medieval era. Juan Carlos played host to Arab billionaires at Marbella on the Costa del Sol, rubbed shoulders with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2009, received a ceremonial key to the Moroccan capital, Rabat, from Mohammed VI in 2013, and attended the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix for years with Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
He was showered with gifts, including two Ferraris valued at $400,000 from the government of the United Arab Emirates (they were later donated to the National Heritage Trust). “And he started getting into business with his rich friends,” says Peñafiel, who claims that the king received gifts for facilitating deals between Arab leaders and Spanish businessmen. “It [may have been] legal, but it was not ethical. And he began to make a small fortune from this work.”
Juan Carlos was hardly the first monarch to have extramarital liaisons, but if one is to believe some reports, few in recent history have matched his indefatigability—or recklessness. Specifics about the king’s wandering eye were not known to the Spanish public before 2012; those among the Spanish press who knew largely kept mum out of respect for what Juan Carlos had done for Spain. There were rumors of multitudes of women, and of several deep involvements, including a long affair with one Marta Gayá, a globetrotting decorator from Mallorca.
“I interviewed Juan Carlos’s grandmother, the widow of Alfonso XIII, when she was in exile in Lausanne,” Peñafiel tells me in his Madrid apartment, pointing to a 1969 photo of himself sitting beside the aging royal consort. “She told me, ‘My husband was exactly like my grandson. Both are womanizers. That’s the legacy of the Borbóns.’ ” (Alfonso XIII had at least five illegitimate children and an untold number of mistresses.)
Among Juan Carlos’s entanglements, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, née Larsen, stood out. The Frankfurt-born daughter of a Danish Varig Airlines executive, the twice-married businesswoman and mother of two (she took the last name of her second husband, a German prince) was organizing shooting expeditions for wealthy clients of the British gunmaker Boss & Co. when an aristocratic friend introduced her to Juan Carlos at a hunt in Spain in 2004. In the years that followed, Juan Carlos showered her with real estate in Switzerland and London, housed her in a villa near Zarzuela Palace, took her to business meetings with Arab princes and wealthy Spanish investors, and introduced her as his novia, or girlfriend, to members of his inner circle. At one point, Irujo says, he announced to his confidants that he intended to divorce the queen and marry his mistress.
“Felipe thought, When the time comes for me to be king, there’s not going to be any monarchy, because this guy is going to destroy everything.”
The Casa Real and other insiders knew that the news blackout couldn’t last forever—especially in the social media age—and they watched the king’s deepening infatuation with alarm. The dynasty that Juan Carlos had singlehandedly resurrected, they believed, was now in danger of being fatally undermined. “They did all they could to stop this relationship,” de Cozar tells me. One powerful politician whom de Cozar does not name “gave him an ultimatum: ‘Corona or Corinna’ ” (corona being Spanish for crown). Among those most concerned by the affair was the heir to the throne, Felipe, who grasped that the family’s popularity rested on its wholesome image. “He thought, When the time comes for me to be king, there’s not going to be any monarchy, because this guy is going to destroy everything.”
In 2009, under enormous pressure from the Casa Real, the romance officially came to an end. Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein would tell the BBC in 2020 that she had broken things off after discovering that Juan Carlos was seeing another woman on the side. However, Juan Carlos, she claims, continued to contact her.
On April 14, 2012, the Casa Real announced that the king had required urgent surgery after fracturing his hip in three places in an “accidental fall” during “a private visit to Botswana.” The royal family offered few details, but with Spain being battered by a deep recession and with 25 percent unemployment, the press began digging into what seemed like a terribly ill-timed trip. The “private visit,” it turned out, was a $60,000 elephant hunting safari paid for by a Saudi benefactor on a private reserve in the Okavango Delta. It was bad enough that the king had ventured off on an all-expenses-paid luxury safari to murder beloved animals while his people were suffering; he had also gone with zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and her 10-year-old son. “It came out of nowhere,” says de Cozar. “It was like, ‘Wow, what is this guy doing?’ ”
With that revelation, Paul Preston says, “the dam burst. A whole pile of journalists who knew this stuff for a decade—about the financial improprieties, the love affairs—were getting frustrated, and a trickle became a flow.” Mounting anger among politicians and the public obliged Juan Carlos to utter an apology on television, brief and perfunctory. Spaniards were not so willing to forgive. One year later, in April 2013, 53 percent of those surveyed expressed negative feelings about him. In November 2014, after months of rumors, denials, secret negotiations, and pressure from his son, Juan Carlos announced he was abdicating the throne. The official reason was age—he was 76—but most Spaniards understood that he’d been forced out to save a weakened institution. “Nothing like it had ever happened in the history of the Spanish monarchy,” Preston says. “This was a bombshell.”
Further bombshells awaited. José Manuel Villarejo, a grizzled former Madrid police commissioner, had allegedly turned an aptitude for gathering dirt into a lucrative—and crooked—enterprise, taping meetings and phone calls with top Spanish businessmen and politicians and selling the compromising information to their rivals. (Villarejo, whose trial is ongoing, denies the charges, saying the Spanish secret service is responsible for the recordings.)
In a recorded 2016 meeting in London with Villarejo, zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, as reported in El País, came forth with a series of stunning revelations. She talked about $7 million in cash bestowed on the king from the leaders of Kuwait and Bahrain in 2008 and 2009; and a $100 million payment in 2008 from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia—a reward for Juan Carlos, she said, for brokering a multibillion-dollar contract between Saudi Arabia and a consortium of 12 Spanish and two Saudi firms to build a high-speed railway between Mecca and Medina. That money, in turn, was the source of $65 million that Juan Carlos transferred into a Bahamian account belonging to zu Sayn-Wittgenstein—in 2012, after the Botswana debacle. “I think it was recognition of how much I meant to him, how much [my son] meant to him,” she would tell the BBC in 2020. She said that when Juan Carlos had demanded the money back in 2014, she refused, claiming it was an “irrevocable gift.”
The recordings were leaked to two small online Spanish publications in 2018. That was enough for Swiss prosecutors (and, later, Spanish ones) to open probes into the ex-king, which, El País reported, uncovered documents connecting a foundation and a labyrinth of accounts in Switzerland and the Bahamas to money from Arab leaders.
In the end, Swiss and Spanish investigators would determine that no proof existed of quid pro quos for the gifts. But public perception that the king was wheeling and dealing, supporting his lifestyle through secret transactions with foreign billionaires, coupled with more allegations of a string of extramarital liaisons, shattered what was left of Juan Carlos’s reputation. Coming at a time of indifference toward the corona from a new generation of Spaniards, and overt hostility from secession-minded citizens in Catalonia, such revelations “put the Casa Real in the center of a political storm, and it was terrible for King Felipe,” says Carlos Pérez Gil, editor of the Spanish news service Agencia EFE. The final straw, Irujo says, was Felipe’s discovery that his father had named him as a beneficiary in the Lukum Foundation fund, one of those secretive financial structures being investigated by the Swiss—an apparently paternal move that backfired badly. Felipe was “furious,” Irujo says, that he had been dragged into his father’s shenanigans.
On March 15, 2020, the first day of Spain’s coronavirus lockdown, Felipe issued a statement announcing that he had renounced his inheritance from his father and terminated the former king’s pension. On August 8, Juan Carlos boarded a private jet in the city of Vigo, near Sanxenxo, and flew to Abu Dhabi—the oil-rich emirate controlled for centuries by his close friends the Al Nahyans—to begin an indefinite exile.
How could Juan Carlos have botched things so badly? For one thing, Peñafiel and other longtime observers say, his obsession with attaining the stature and lifestyle of the Windsors had clouded his moral judgment and driven him to accept cash handouts without regard to how they might look. Compounding that was his belief that the affection of the population he had won by staring down the coup plotters in 1981 was eternal. “Juan Carlos had been elevated to a kind of saint, the man who brought democracy to Spain,” says José Alvarez Junco. “He thought he was invulnerable.” And, living in a bubble of hunting trips and yacht races, surrounded by courtiers willing to cater to all his appetites (“There were no limits to his behavior,” says Irujo), he badly misread the mood of Spaniards and of the Spanish media. In an era marked by a newly aggressive press at home and relentless exposure of the bad conduct of celebrities worldwide, including monarchs, Juan Carlos remained hopelessly out of touch.
And then, of course, came his fatal misjudgment—of character. A charismatic romantic (the charitable view) who had cut a swath over six decades, Juan Carlos had met his match in Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. “She took him down,” says de Cozar. “It was a huge miscalculation on the part of Juan Carlos and of the Spanish deep state. Nobody fully realized the trouble that this woman was going to cause.” (And she’s not done with Juan Carlos yet. In 2020 she filed a civil suit against him in London’s High Court charging him with harassment and “great personal injury” for the efforts of Spanish intelligence, in the wake of the Botswana episode, to keep her quiet. In March 2022 a High Court judge rejected Juan Carlos’s claim that he is entitled to immunity from the jurisdiction of the English court. A UK court has permitted the ex-king to appeal that rejection.)
Today the king emeritus resides in a $12 million, six-bedroom seaside villa on Zaya Nurai, a speck of an island a 15-minute boat ride from the Abu Dhabi mainland. He spends his days lazing around the compound and entertaining a handful of friends. Even in his isolation, the ex-king has shown a knack for seeking out the wrong people. One occasional visitor, El País reported, has been the Lebanese-Spanish arms dealer Abdul Rahman El Assir, who is wanted by Interpol for tax fraud and other crimes but who moves freely about the emirate. “Juan Carlos’s best friends are telling him, ‘This man is a criminal. Do not be with him. Other countries are looking for him.’ And he answers, with a whiskey in his hand, ‘Bah,’ ” Irujo says, citing palace sources. “I don’t think he’s ever preoccupied…or afraid. And he just doesn’t believe he’s ever done anything wrong.”
Meantime, at Zarzuela Palace King Felipe is still trying to right the listing ship. Since he took over in 2014 he has earned respect for restoring decorum and integrity to the tattered throne. His wife, Queen Letizia, with whom he has two daughters (Leonor, Princess of Asturias, 16, the heir to the throne, and Infanta Sofía of Spain, 15), may be the monarchy’s most popular figure, perhaps in part because she is reported to have stood up to the former king. (Juan Carlos opposed the marriage, says Peñafiel, because Letizia, a lively commoner from Oviedo who was a divorced former journalist and news anchor, was the “granddaughter of a taxi driver.”)
Recent polls, however, show that the monarchy’s approval numbers have slipped dramatically among Spaniards under thirty, with less than 30 percent saying they wish to keep it. And unlike his father, who came across as a symbol of unity and reconciliation, Felipe can be a polarizing figure. He took a harsh line toward the independence movement in Catalonia, accusing its leaders of “inadmissible disloyalty.” On recent visits to the region, crowds booed him.
“So many people were not monarchists, they were Juan Carlists. And now…something has been destroyed.”
The mystique and power of the Borbón dynasty, so closely associated with Juan Carlos, has drastically dissipated. “We started as a modern country with the constitution in 1978, and that country was built by Juan Carlos. The power he had was amazing,” says de Cozar. “So many people were not monarchists, they were Juan Carlists. And now…something has been destroyed.” It is the great irony of Felipe’s position that, in removing the man who he believed betrayed the family and the crown, he may in fact have accelerated the monarchy’s dissolution. The question, de Cozar says, is this: “Are people Felipists? Are new generations of Spaniards going to support the idea of the Spanish monarchy without Juan Carlos? I just don’t see it.” For the moment, the monarchy appears stable, but it’s a stability not backed by much enthusiasm, reflecting a global trend.
Abolishing the Borbón monarchy is a long shot. It would require an amendment to the constitution, a tortuous process that would necessitate approval by two-thirds of each of Spain’s two legislative houses, followed by a popular referendum. Nevertheless, the Republicans did away with the monarchy in 1931, a trauma stamped into the mind of every Borbón, and it’s not out of the question that Spain could, in the not so distant future, become, like France, a republic again. Not everybody believes that would make for a healthier democracy. The British actor-historian Stephen Fry, for one, points out that constitutional monarchs can serve as the moral authority of a nation and a check on overreaching politicians. The British monarchy, he says, is “preposterous” but “it works terribly well.”
As for Juan Carlos, the 84-year-old ex-king is still hoping to make a permanent return to Spain, according to journalists who follow the story. In early 2022 he paid the Spanish treasury $5.2 million in back taxes and penalties for undeclared income he owed as a result of the investigation, a necessary step toward putting him on safe legal ground for a homecoming. “He’ll try to normalize his visits here,” says Carlos Pérez Gil. (A June 10 visit was canceled “for private reasons,” and there is no word yet on the next one.) Pérez Gil believes, too, that if the current Socialist government loses to a right-wing party—generally more supportive of the Spanish monarchy—in the 2023 national elections, the new atmosphere might work in the former monarch’s favor. De Cozar is less sure. “Felipe doesn’t want him back. The politicians don’t want him back.”
The economic adviser I meet in Madrid dares to express the unthinkable: The best-case scenario for all concerned, he believes, would be for the elderly Juan Carlos to pass away quietly in Abu Dhabi exile. “His body will return in an airplane,” he tells me, asking again that I don’t identify him. “There will be magnificent memorials. And Spain will wash itself of the problem.”
This story appears in the September 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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