Don Juan Carlos personally decided the agenda for his first visit to Spain after a 21-month stay in the United Arab Emirates. «It has been a decision of Don Juan Carlos himself, both the chosen date and the meetings that he is going to hold. It is a visit in the private sphere,” sources familiar with the ins and outs of this first visit, described in his close circle as a “reunion,” inform ABC.
In this sense, the House of His Majesty the King officially learned on Wednesday afternoon -and definitively after some final changes- that Don Juan Carlos was going to visit Spain this Thursday and until Monday, when he will have lunch at La Zarzuela with Felipe VI, Doña Sofía and other relatives.
It was then that the communication of the decision by La Zarzuela began. It was 9:06 p.m. when the message was distributed, somewhat later than desirable due to these changes.
In the statement there was a key paragraph that summarizes the feelings of La Zarzuela about the visit of the King’s father two and a half months after the Prosecutor’s Office shelved the three investigations that weighed on his person in Spain: “This visit is part of the desire of His Majesty King Juan Carlos to travel frequently to Spain to visit family and friends, and organize his personal life and his place of residence in areas of a private nature, as expressed in the letter he addressed to His Majesty the King on March 5.”
That letter is key because it excludes any stay of Don Juan Carlos in the Palacio de la Zarzuela, a reason that has focused part of the media interest and the organization of a visit whose sequence offers the following keys:
Last Sunday, the House of H.M. the King reported that Don Felipe and Don Juan Carlos had had a telephone conversation in Abu Dhabi, where the King went to convey condolences for the death of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan.
«Before leaving Abu Dhabi and given the characteristics of the ceremony, D. Felipe spoke on the phone with King Juan Carlos, and they agreed to meet in Madrid when D. Juan Carlos comes to Spain».
The next day, journalists close to Don Juan Carlos such as Carlos Herrera or Fernando Ónega reported on Don Juan Carlos’s stay in Sanxenjo over the weekend.
That the decision of the “reunion” was sudden, after some passing rumor of a visit last Easter, has another key in that Doña Sofía traveled, as she had promised, to Miami to “be present, privately, in the activities organized in that city by the ‘Queen Sofia Spanish Institute’ to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation, coinciding with the arrival in Miami of the Navy training ship Juan Sebastián de Elcano.
This was reported from La Zarzuela, which stressed that Doña Sofía “planned to return to Madrid on Sunday, May 22.”
Sources close to Don Juan Carlos explain that he wanted to see Doña Sofía during his stay, so the visit to La Zarzuela was reserved for last, although the choice of Sanxenjo first had another, more symbolic explanation.
Don Juan Carlos, who has designed the itinerary for this first visit, had the “personal commitment” that his “reunion” with Spain would be at the same starting point on that August 3, 2020; “Sanxenxo’s election was a symbolic decision.”
In addition, the celebration of the ‘6 meter class’ regatta at the Club Náutico added an emotional and camaraderie factor to this three and a half day visit to Galician lands, where he will meet up with friends. Being away from the ‘focus’ of Madrid, where he would have liked to go to attend a bullfight in Las Ventas, for example, was another of the cornerstones of the decision to go to Sanxenjo during this first visit.
As noted in the call last Sunday, the visit of Don Juan Carlos to Madrid, and more specifically to the Palacio de la Zarzuela, was mandatory. Thus, father and son will have a first meeting after 21 months without doing so, unless it has transpired.
From the House of His Majesty the King they circumscribe this meeting to a “private” act, which in no case will be included in the agenda of the Royal Family that La Zarzuela distributes every Friday.
In the afternoon, after the family reunion, Don Juan Carlos will take off from Madrid to Abu Dhabi in the same Gulfstream G450 private jet from the private flight airline Bestfly.
Don Juan Carlos is already planning a second trip to Spain next month if circumstances allow. The main destination will once again be Sanxenxo, where a regatta will take place from June 10 to 18. On that second occasion, it is expected that the media impact will not be as intense as that of this first “reunion”.
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