65 years after the tragedy that marked the life of King Juan Carlos: the day he killed his brother

A small .22 caliber revolver, one dead and only one witness: King Juan Carlos. The only certainties of a puzzling episode in which the history of the Spanish monarchy has been painted with tragedy. Easter 1956 passed and the royal family rested at Villa Giralda, in the Portuguese municipality of Estoril, where they had settled after the forced exile by the triumph of the Republicans in Spain, first, and the victory of General Francisco Franco in the Civil War, later.

To prevent the pool of blood from spreading further, after hearing a gunshot and running into the playroom where her two children -Alfonsito, 14-year-old and Juan Carlos, 18, were maneuvering a weapon, Don Juan de Borbón y Battenberg wrapped the small lifeless body in a Spanish flag which he tore from his mast and deeply disturbed, he addressed the elder of the two and future heir. of the Crown: “Swear to me you didn’t do it on purpose!”

In the absence of an official investigation into what happened and the silence of who would be King of Spain from 1975 until his abdication in 2014, from then on and now it was just speculation and rumor. What if the weapon had been a gift from the dictator Franco; that if the episode had meant the final rupture between don Juan and his son Juan Carlos or if it was simply one more tragedy than those which followed, at that time, the Bourbons and which supported the theory of curse: children who died in childbirth, infants who died very young, fatal traffic accidents, congenital diseases, disabilities and unhappy queens.

“While the child Don Alfonso de Borbón was cleaning a parlor weapon with his brother, the pistol exploded, hitting him in the frontal area, dying after a few minutes. The accident happened at 8:30 p.m., when he returned from Maundy Thursday services, where he had received Holy Communion. These two sentences were the only official communication on the subject after what happened, in which the responsibility of the older brother, who would have been the one who pulled the trigger.

This was confirmed by the testimony of Don Jaime de Borbón, the children’s uncle, in a letter sent to his secretary: “My dear Ramón: several friends have confirmed to me recently that it was my nephew Juan Carlos who accidentally killed his brother Alfonso.” Also Bernardo Arnoso, a friend of his father, would have said a while later that heThe future king confessed that he targeted Don Alfonso thinking he was not charged and that he pulled the trigger to impress him.

The censorship that reigned in Spain during the years following the episode, and which was also reproduced in Portugal under the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, prevented the media from breaking the official silence. It wasn’t until 2015 that the now emeritus king Juan Carlos spoke publicly about what happened for the first time, although, again, without too much detail.

“Now I miss him a lot. Not having him by my side. Not being able to talk to him. We were very close, I loved him very much and he loved me very much. He was very nice,” Juan Carlos said in front of him. the cameras in the documentary I, Juan Carlos I, King of Spain, by Franco-Spanish director Miguel Courtois.

According to the missing journalist Juan Balansó, author of several works on the Spanish monarchy, “Alfonsito he was a naughty and alert boy, very kind, who made the lives of those who knew him happy. ” His death marked the royal family forever, to the point that his mother, Dona Maria, said that on the day of her death “her life came to an end”. His father, the historians gathered around him, never again spoke in public of his deceased son, whom he called in private “my dear son. Alfonsito“.

Alfonsito He was buried in Estoril, in the presence of the family and some members of the monarchy, who traveled to Portugal to bring him bags of Spanish soil that they placed on his grave. In 1992, thirty-six years after his death, his remains were transferred to the family pantheon located in the city of Madrid.

About his brother, some consider the episode 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, when he was finally able to take the crown.

Despite what one might think, however, the monarch developed throughout his life a real obsession with firearms, so much so that he starred in a series of scandals for his love of hunting, to which he devoted trips to extravagant destinations and exorbitant sums of money. Is it perhaps, in addition to a paradox, his own way of remembering Alfonsito? How will he do today, 65 years after this tragic youthful episode, in his golden refuge in the United Arab Emirates while the Spanish justice is investigating him for corruption?

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