reconciliation, The book Memories of the King Emeritus, Juan Carlos I, arrives on Wednesday in Spanish bookstores, almost a month after its publication in France. In the book, published by Planeta Publishing House in Spain, the honorary king reviews his life from his birth in Rome on January 5, 1938 in exile, until he left the country voluntarily to move to Abu Dhabi, where he has resided since August 2020.
In more than 500 pages narrated in the first person, Juan Carlos I, now 87 years old and since his retirement in Abu Dhabi, asserts that the Spanish Crown “rests entirely upon him,” as the Constitution stipulates, and claims his democratic “inheritance” of Spain, a country he longs for and would like to return to after half a century of parliamentary monarchy.
The book was released two days after Juan Carlos I himself broadcast a video in which he asked Felipe VI to support the youth in “the hard work that unites all Spaniards” and stated that the goal of the book was to tell the modern history of Spain “without interesting distortions.” The memoir is dedicated to his family and everyone who accompanied him through the transition, and he explains in the introduction that he feels his story was “stolen.”
The King Emeritus admits that he has made “mistakes” and that he is not a “saint”, as he defends his democratic heritage in a country where he arrived when he was ten years old to be apprenticed to the dictator Francisco Franco, for whom he does not hide a certain sympathy. He also admits to the existence of “emotional deviations”, the details of which he hardly mentions, but confirms that “most” of the extramarital affairs attributed to him are “completely imaginary.” Without citing Corinna Larsen, the king stressed that “a certain relationship” had been “skillfully exploited,” which had “serious consequences for his reign.”
After his deployment in France, Juan Carlos gave several interviews to French newspapers and France 3 television, in which he admitted that he had made “mistakes,” but said that he did not regret his past and did not feel remorse or try “not to exist,” although if he had been able to return, he would have been more careful.
The arrival of these diaries in Spain comes days after the King Emeritus attended, on November 22, a family lunch with the royalty at the Royal Palace in El Pardo, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the restoration of the monarchy, a private ceremony held the day after the official celebration, to which he was not invited, and in which Queen Sofia received the Golden Fleece in an institutional event.