When El Pais published a profile last year of the Spanish queen, Letizia, a government minister described her as “our most important help. I thought she was cold and distant, but she is professional, normal and fun.” The news from Madrid this week might make fun in short supply for Letizia, and courtiers must be choking on their churros. Jaime del Burgo, a businessman, old friend and ex-boyfriend of Letizia’s, has claimed that he hasn’t always been quite as much of an ex as courtiers might wish. Their romance in fact continued after her marriage in 2004, he claims, and ran until she ended it, in 2011. He published, then deleted, a photo of her when visibly pregnant, claiming that she sent it to him during their affair with a message reading: “Love. I am wearing your pashmina. It is like feeling you by my side. It looks after me. Protects me. I am counting the hours until we see each other again, love you, get out of here. Yours.” Oh yes, and the year after she dumped him, he married her sister. Ouf, as they don’t say in Spain.
The claims surfaced on Monday in an obscure online magazine, El Cierre Digital. Jaime Penafiel, the author of a new book, Letizia and I, about del Burgo, told the magazine that Letizia was del Burgo’s “great love”, a love that turned into a “great friendship” after she met Felipe. Now the claims have gone mainstream after an influential Spanish commentator sprang to Letizia’s defence. In an article in El Confidencial, José Antonio Zarzalejos railed against detractors “spreading dirt” about the queen. “The defence of Queen Letizia’s honour, of her right to honour, is equivalent to the defence of the right to honour and freedom of all Spanish citizens.”
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Letizia was a well-known television news journalist and anchor when she met the future king of Spain. Introduced at a dinner party in 2002, they hit it off when he visited the scene of an oil spillage off the Spanish coast that she was covering. They managed to conduct their relationship in secret, so their engagement announcement, when it came in November 2003, surprised everyone and horrified some. Snobs pointed out that she would be the first “commoner” queen in Spanish history and, indeed, yesterday, in his defence of the queen, Zarzalejos said some had never forgiven her for being a divorcee and a commoner.
Her future father-in-law, King Juan Carlos, called her “the enemy within”, a reference to her career as a journalist. According to a 2015 book, The Court of Felipe VI, Juan Carlos “joked” that Letizia’s arrival was “the worst thing that happened” to the royals for years and that his son’s determination to marry her was “about to destroy the monarchy”. The early echoes of the misogynistic treatment of Kate Middleton, another commoner derided as a social climber, were there from the start. William’s friends allegedly referred to Carole Middleton, a former flight attendant, as “doors to manual”. Juan Carlos’s aristocratic friends referred to Letizia as “la chacha” — the maid. Once, after she gave a speech about the Middle East, Juan Carlos told her: “Yes, Letizia, we know you are the clever one, but you can stop talking now.”
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By the time she met Felipe, Letizia’s recent CV included broadcasting live from Ground Zero after 9/11, and covering US presidential elections and the Iraq war. A year later, before marrying into the royal family, she quit her job. Twenty-five million TV viewers watched the couple marry in Madrid in 2004. The bride wore a dramatic white gown with a stand-up collar by the Spanish designer Manuel Pertegaz, recommended by her mother-in-law, Queen Sofia, and a veil of silk tulle gifted to her by her groom.
“They were the fairytale couple,” one royal watcher said, “a breath of fresh air which the royal family badly needed.”
When Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano was born in northern Spain in 1972, the Spanish monarchy didn’t exist. The country was a republic, six years away from restoring the monarchy. According to the author Andrew Morton, the Rocasolanos were republicans who shouted abuse at Juan Carlos when he appeared on TV at Christmas, but Letizia was solidly middle class, her mother a nurse and her father a journalist. She studied communications at university in Madrid, gained a master’s in broadcast journalism, and worked her way rapidly up the career ladder from student journalism to local newspapers and national TV. She spent a year working in Mexico, returning to Spain for a job at Spanish Bloomberg and later CNN.
In 1998 she married a teacher whom she met when she was 16. He was nine years her senior and they dated for ten years before marrying, but divorced a year later. She later lived with another long-term boyfriend, a sports reporter. Del Burgo, 53, a businessman based in Britain, told Penafiel that he met and began a relationship with Letizia some time before 2000, years before she met Felipe. He claimed to be on the verge of proposing in 2002, the night she told him over dinner that she was dating a mystery “diplomat”. The diplomat was Felipe and Letizia asked del Burgo to be a witness at their wedding. He married her sister, Telma, in 2012, but the marriage ended two years later in divorce.
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Letizia was 31 when she married Felipe. The couple were initially credited with increasing support for the royal family. Like Middleton, she won plaudits for championing home-grown brands such as Zara and Mango alongside more high-end designers. Like her, she started to focus her work on children and education. And like her, she became a mainstay of ¡Hola!, just as Kate is a mainstay of Hello!. Both are fitness fanatics, and still count people they met at school and university as some of their closest friends.
“The intellectual, professional, high-achieving power class of Madrid is much more Letizia’s scene than the decadent yachts of most European royals,” wrote the author Matthew Bell in 2017, noting that while she and Felipe were invited to the lavish 21st birthday celebrations of Maria-Olympia, the daughter of Crown Prince Pavlos and Marie-Chantal of Greece, Letizia didn’t go. “She’s not very social with other royals, shall we say,” a source told Bell. “She feels more comfortable with her long-term friends than with this new set she finds herself in.”
The couple’s first daughter, Leonor, was born in 2005 and their second, Sofia, in 2007. The same year, Letizia suffered tragedy when her younger sister, Erika, died suddenly aged 31, leaving a six-year-old daughter.
In 2014 Letizia and Felipe found themselves in the top job. Juan Carlos abdicated in disgrace, brought down by scandal and corruption allegations involving his daughter. Against such a backdrop, their coronation was a low-key affair where the crown was displayed, not worn. Enthusiastic crowds greeted the new king and queen when they stepped onto the palace balcony, and in Felipe’s inaugural address as king he promised “a renewed monarchy for new times”.
Rumours that Letizia’s relationship with her mother-in-law, Sofia, was fraught came to a head in 2018 when Letizia repeatedly tried to ruin a photo opportunity of the former queen standing with her granddaughters on the steps of Palma cathedral by repeatedly walking in front of her. The social editor of Spanish Vanity Fair said that “the Spanish people are pretty angry” about Letizia’s behaviour. Marie-Chantal of Greece said, “No grandmother deserves that type of treatment,” and even the leader of the opposition was drawn into the row, telling Spanish radio “relationships with the in-laws are always complicated”. For her part, Sofia complained to friends that Letizia didn’t let her see her granddaughters often enough.
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According to The Court of Felipe VI, Letizia had “multiple faults”, including a desire to control her press, a lack of diplomacy with employees and “a lack of respect for some aspects of the crown”, which may sound familiar in Montecito. But until Señor del Burgo staged his intervention, their recent press had been positive. When Leonor turned 18 this year and took the oath of allegiance to the constitution, coverage was enthusiastic. Ditto in the summer, when Letizia took her younger daughter, Sofia, 16, to the women’s World Cup final in Sydney and was photographed jumping for joy when Spain beat England.
At a reception in Madrid last summer President Biden provoked laughter when he joked that he and Felipe had “both married way above our stations”. Del Burgo is quoted in Letizia and I as saying that at his wedding to Telma, Letizia whispered in his ear, “We’ll be together again.” Why he is airing such allegations now, and whether there is any truth to them, is unclear. Next May will be Letizia and Felipe’s 20th wedding anniversary. Whether it will be much of a celebration remains to be seen.
