63 years of the mysterious episode in which King Juan Carlos killed his brother

A 22 caliber revolver, a dead man and a witness: King Juan Carlos. The only certainties of a confusing episode in which the history of the Spanish monarchy was painted tragedy. Holy Week pbaded in 1956 and the royal family took a rest at Villa Giralda, in the Portuguese municipality of Estoril, where he had settled after the exile that forced the triumph of Republicans in Spain and then the victory General Francisco Franco in the civil war, later.

To prevent the blood pool from spreading further, after hearing a shot and entering the playroom where his two sons – "Alfonsito", 14, and Juan Carlos, 18 – were maneuvering a firearm, Don Juan de Bourbon and Battenberg wrapped the small lifeless body in a Spanish flag that left his mast and deeply troubled addressed the older of the two and future heir to the Crown: "Swear you did not do it on purpose!"

In the absence of an official inquiry into what happened and the silence of who would be the king of Spain from 1975 until his abdication in 2014, From there, everything is speculation and rumor. That if the weapon had been a gift of dictator Franco, that if the episode had meant the definitive break between Don Juan and his son Juan Carlos or that it was simply a tragedy more than those that the Bourbons were following then and that they paid the theory of curse: children killed in childbirth, very young children who died, fatal road accidents, conbad diseases, handicaps and unhappy queens.

"When the infant Don Alfonso de Borbón was cleaning a pistol in the living room with his brother, the shot went off and hit him in the frontal area, dying a few minutes later. The accident occurred at 8:30 pm, when he returned from Holy Thursday, where he had received communion. "These two prayers were the only official communication on the subject after what had happened and he had chosen to avoid the responsibility of the Big brother, who would have been the one who pulled the trigger.

This was confirmed by the testimony of Don Jaime de Borbón, children's uncle, in a letter to his secretary: "My dear Ramón: Several friends have recently confirmed that it was my nephew Juan Carlos who had killed his brother Alfonso by accident". Also Bernardo Arnoso, a friend of his father, would have counted a time afterThe future king confessed that he had pointed Don Alfonso thinking that he was not loaded and had pulled the trigger to impress him.

The censorship that reigned in Spain in the years following this episode was also reproduced in Portugal under the António de Oliveira Salazar, prevented the media from breaking with the official silence. It was necessary to wait until 2015 for the now-eminent King, Juan Carlos, to publicly speak for the first time of what happened without too much detail though.

"Now I miss him a lot, I do not have him by my side, I can not talk to him, we were very close, I liked him a lot and he likes me a lot, he was very nice, "said Juan Carlos in front of the documentary cameras Me, Juan Carlos I, King of Spain, from Franco-Spanish director Miguel Courtois.

According to the missing journalist Juan Balansó, author of several books on the Spanish monarchy, "Alfonsito was a naughty and awake boy, very kind, who made life happy for those who knew him". His death marked the royal family forever, to the point that his mother, Dona Maria, declared that the day of her death "her life was stopped". His father, the historians gathered around him, never spoke in public about his dead son, whom he privately called "my dear son Alfonsito".

"Alfonsito" was buried in Estoril, in the presence of the family and members of the monarchy, who went to Portugal to take him bags of Spanish land that they deposited on his grave. In 1992, thirty-six years after his death, his remains were transferred to the family vault located in Madrid.

About his brother, some consider that the episode has deepened the introspective and lonely profile. The day after his tragic death, he was sent to Spain, where he grew up and completed his training far from his family and in the shadow of Franco, whom he accompanied until his death, before he finally be able to take the crown. Despite what one might think, though, the monarch has developed all his life a real obsession for firearms, to the point of playing in a series of scandals for his love of hunting, for which he has devoted trips to extravagant destinations and exorbitant amounts of money. Is it perhaps, in addition to a paradox, his way of remembering Alfonsito?