Changes, more professional profiles and a greater proportion of women in key positions. It is the policy of any company or organization that wants to adapt to current times, and it is also that of the head of state. Although in the 1990s the first steps were taken to modernize the institution at the request of Juan Carlos I, who was 37 years old when he came to the throne, today the House of the King has taken steps to try to continue adapting the ancient institution to the 21st century. This year alone, Felipe VI placed women at the head of the Chamber: Mercedes Araújo Díaz de Terán was appointed secretary general; Carmen Castiella Ruiz de Velasco, advisor for diplomatic affairs; Marta Carazo, Secretary to the Queen, and Rosa Lerchundi, Director of Communications.
During these 50 years of parliamentary monarchy, La Zarzuela made significant changes in its leadership. It is an attempt to dismiss the archaic and outdated image that could emerge of an institution which, in itself, stands out for its immobility and whose highest representative occupies this position from birth and for life, except in the case of abdication, which is an “unnatural way of ending a reign”, in the words of Rafael Spottorno, President of the House between 2011 and 2014 and key figure in the institutional end of Juan Carlos I.
Fernando Almansa, the first President of the House who was not a soldier, but a diplomat, was a pioneer by introducing a professional, the journalist Asunción Valdés (Alicante, 1950), to a command position in 1993, to later lead La Zarzuela. “I came to modernize the house,” boasts Almansa (77) from the living room of his house located in one of the best areas of Madrid. As successor to Sabino Fernández Campo and Nicolás Cotoner y Cotoner, both soldiers and now deceased, Almansa entered La Zarzuela at the age of 44.
Almansa points out that this task of modernization was a commitment of Juan Carlos I, who entered a house in which everyone was a soldier, male and older than him. “Even the names of the jobs were military. They spoke of ‘units’ and not of departments, or ‘intendance’ to designate the administration,” Asunción Valdés recalled over the phone, adding that the nomenclature only changed “in the middle of the 21st century.” Almansa, who led the House until 2002, justifies that the management of La Zarzuela “is very vertical”, pursuing this military sense: the King goes first, then the head of the House and from there everything else depends. Juan Carlos I didn’t want taifa kingdoms.
The first woman in a command position in the head of state’s apparatus was tasked with transforming a communications team which had somewhat forgotten its relations with the news media. “There was a team made up of very prepared people, but none of them were journalists,” Valdés remembers. She insisted on appointing a number two that he spoke Catalan because “Spain is not just Madrid, it is much more”. It was Jordi Gutiérrez. During those years, Valdés also launched the La Zarzuela website and, advised by the security department due to ETA’s intense terrorist activity, began sharing the royal family’s weekly agenda with the media, although “with very little notice,” she says. The journalist also remembers that her first informative challenge was the death of Don Juan, and the last, the end of the heir’s courtship with the Norwegian Eva Sannum.
During these years, the Princely Secretariat was also created, responsible for the official agenda of Felipe de Borbón y Grecia when, after his master’s degree at Georgetown (United States), he left alone, paving the way for a future head of state. An Office for which he had another civilian, the State Attorney Jaime Alfonsín, and whose position and purpose will surely be maintained to serve and advise Princess Leonor when she finishes her university studies, still to be defined, and which, in line with the feminization of the House, it is plausible that it will be occupied by a woman, say sources who advise the Kings.
During those years, another official weekly meeting with his own family (Queen Sofía, the Infantes Elena and Cristina and Prince Felipe) was added to the weekly office that the head of state maintained with the president of the government, responsible for coordinating agendas and distributing responsibilities. “They commented on receptions, requests for hearings, etc. Finally, the king was informed of everything. (…) I tried to make the Chamber work more as a team. The previous stage, with Sabino (Fernández Campo), was something else,” Almansa remembers.
However, it is the current head of the House of the King, also a diplomat Camilo Villarino (60), who has introduced the most changes and the most quickly in the workings of an institution which, according to those who know it, must find the balance between maintaining a certain distance and the liturgy with getting closer to citizens and trying to be a reflection of the society it represents. “We have to adapt to national and global political circumstances. For example, with all the impact of social networks and new technologies,” explains Villarino.
The current number one of the House seeks “excellence”, he said, and the King proposed to Mercedes Araújo Díaz de Terán (55 years old), until then lawyer of the Cortès, to occupy the General Secretariat of his House. “If I wanted to send a message, I had to find women,” he recalls from his office in La Zarzuela. For the first time, the controls of La Zarzuela are co-piloted by a number two woman and belonging to the generation of Kings. Araújo thus replaces Lieutenant General of the Civil Guard Domingo Martínez Palomo, 71 years old. Just like Carmen Castiella Ruiz de Velasco, 52, who advises Felipe VI on diplomatic matters, succeeding Alfonso Sanz Portolés (71), present at La Zarzuela for almost a decade.
Another of the decisions taken by Villarino after his arrival from the Brussels offices to walk the carpets of the Palace in February 2024 was the appointment of María Ocaña, a 51-year-old woman and a civilian (state lawyer), as secretary to Queen Letizia, replacing José Manuel Zuleta y Alejandro, a 60-year-old major general in the Spanish army. Villarino acknowledges, however, that in this case it was the queen who initiated the process and made the final decision. Ocaña, who left the Secretariat a year later for “compelling personal reasons”, was replaced in September by her compatriot and journalist Marta Carazo (52 years old).
The Communication department of the Maison du Roi was the last to be renewed. “When I arrive, I think what is appropriate is that we show citizens more what the Crown is, what the Chamber is, how we work… The enormous ignorance, even in mundane things, of the majority of people (about the institution) is striking,” emphasizes Villarino. Jordi Gutiérrez, 66 years old, director (director of communications) who was formerly the number two Catalan of Asunción Valdés, left his position after a total of three decades at La Zarzuela, leaving the baton to journalist Rosa Lerchundi (59 years old). House sources maintain that the fact that Lerchundi is now a woman represents another asset and a message from the institution to society.
More than 30 years after his first arrival at La Zarzuela, Valdés now derives “great satisfaction” from the fact that a woman occupies his former position as communications director. “I have already congratulated her and emphasized that she has a very important role, which is to bring the monarchy to the Spanish people,” he said by telephone. Because as Lapuente believes in the aforementioned manual: “Citizens cannot trust an organization whose function they do not know.”
Modernization
The House, at its own pace, is not only professionalized, feminized and rejuvenated, but it is also modernized with Felipe VI and Letizia Ortiz at the helm and the princess and the infanta are looking to the future. In 2014, the Maison du Roi opened an account on X (formerly Twitter) and last year it opened a profile on Instagram, where its publications reach almost a million followers. Additionally, they built a recording studio from which they send videos and messages with a more modern appearance.
The marriage of Felipe VI to Letizia Ortiz already foreshadowed a change of direction in an institution. The queen not only broke with the tradition of belonging to the aristocracy, as was the case of Queen Sofia of Greece (daughter and wife of the king). Moreover, now the first and second places in the line of succession are occupied by a princess (Leonor) and an infanta (Sofía).
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