A close friend of Don Juan Carlos and now his host -he will stay at his house- on his first trip to Spain after almost two months, the president of the Real Club Náutico de Sangenjo, Pedro Campos, will be the first person whom the King Emeritus will embrace as soon as this Thursday afternoon he lands in Vigo and, the last of whom he will say goodbye to when he heads to Madrid on Monday morning to attend the Zarzuela. Campos, who with his own car will be in charge of picking up Don Juan Carlos at the airport, assures ABC that what the Emeritus is most excited about is “returning to Spain.” «Then, far below, there are friends, Galicia, sailing, the environment… but returning to Spain.
He tells me, ‘you don’t know how excited I am to return to Spain’.
Don Juan Carlos is excited about his return to Spain, albeit temporarily. Sangenjo is also excited, the emblematic and touristic Galician town, which, moreover, had been his last stop in our country when he went abroad 22 months ago. Now, metaphorically and almost literally, the King Emeritus returns to ‘his house’ from him: the sports club of the municipality of Pontevedra, in addition, was baptized at the time as Juan Carlos I.
The King Emeritus, after an eight-hour trip, will attend the Viajes InterRías Trophy this Saturday, in whose classic category his boat, the Bribón 500, will participate. Will Don Juan Carlos get on the boat? Well, it depends: “Today is a great day, but the more wind the less chance it will go up, because he doesn’t like it and if so, I don’t want him to do it the first day either,” explains Pedro Campos to ABC shortly before go to Peinador airport (Vigo) to pick up the King Emeritus, who will be accompanied by his eldest daughter, the Infanta Elena, in Sanxenxo.
If the weather conditions are good, perhaps Don Juan Carlos will be encouraged, if not on Saturday then perhaps on Sunday, to get on the Rogue and go to sea. And it is that despite three years without getting on a boat -the last time, in 2019, it was, precisely, in the Pontevedra estuary-, his friend Pedro Campos makes it clear that the King Emeritus has nautical in his genes . Although, yes, in a very different way from his father, Don Juan: «He always said that his father (Don Juan) was a navigator, but that he is a sailor».
Although he has practiced many sports throughout his life, such as horse riding or skiing, nautical “is the only sport he practiced at a high level,” Campos explains to ABC. And he remembers the illusion that had made him proclaim world champion in Canada: «He had never won a world championship, and when we won there, in Canada, he had tears in his eyes. That was a merit of his«, a personal triumph, says Campos.
Sanxenjo prepares for a visit from Don Juan Carlos, which, far from being unique, does become special and historic after his almost three years of absence due to open investigations -all already filed, except one by the British justice system-.
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