The very different lives of Spain’s senior duchesses

Press, 24 July 1986, Page 11

The very different lives of Spain’s senior duchesses

NZPA-Reuter Sanlucar de Barremeda

The two women who are Spain’s senior aristocrats each has a title dating back SCO years, but have radically different life-styles.

Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo y Maura, 21st Duchess of Medina Sidonia, has published three novels and spent eight months in jail under the dictatorship of the late Francisco Franco.

Maria del Rosario Cayetana Fitz James Stuart y Silva, the 17th Duchess of Alba and Duchess of Berwick, is a familiar figure in society

magazines and at jet-set parties on Spain’s Costa del SoL The Duchess of Medina Sidonia, who Is 50, said as she surveyed what was once the family’s vast dukedom from the balcony of her thir-teenth-century palace overlooking the southern coastal town of Sanlucar de Barremeda, “We owned everything from here to Portugal.” She indicated a strip of land along the coast roughly 168 km long. The family, having lost most of its holdings, retains about sGha and the 35-room palace

Alba’s dukedom comes through James II of Scotland. Her oldest family

title is Countess of Lemos, granted in 1456.

The dukedom of Alba preceded the dukedom of Medina Sidonia, but the latter’s direct ancestor, the Count of Niebla, received his title in 1368.

Both duchesses are grandees of Spain, a six-teenth-century title allowing top-ranking noblemen to keep their hats on in the presence of the King.

“We are normal, unpretentious people,” the Duchess of Alba said in her eighteenth-century Madrid palace. The Liria Palace boasts paintings by Francisco de Goya and other Spanish masters in its sprawling

saloons, and a dog cemetery in the garden. “There is nothing strange about us. We lead a workaday life like other people.” The 59-year-old duchess spends half the year in her Andalusian palace, in Seville, devoting much of her time to horses, tennis, and flamenco dancing. “I am also fond of looking after the Liria Palace, but much time is taken up with my duties at the blood donors’ society and other charitable work,” she said. Had the role of the Spanish aristocracy changed since General Franco’s death in 1975 and the restoration of

the monarchy under King Juan Carlos?

“I don’t know if things have changed,” she replied. “My life goes on as always.” The Duchess of Medina Sidonia said things had been changing for the worse since the fifteenth century: “The country started its slide when the Catholic monarchs expelled the Jews and Arabs. They were the only people we had with culture and initiative.”

A Duke of Medina Sidonia led the Spanish Armada to disaster in 1588. Shortly afterwards the 3rd Duke of Alba crushed a revolt in Flanders with such

brutality that Dutch mothers still threaten their unruly children with his name. “I know that I didn’t do anything to deserve my title, so I spend my time working,” the Duchess of Medina Sidonia said. Each morning she drives to the beach with her spaniel in a rusted

Volkswagen Beetle, then spends some eight hours into the night at the typewriter. In the 1969 s she tried to lead a peasants’ march on the United States Embassy in Madrid to demand compensation for a nuclear accident in the coastal village of Palomares. A United States Air

Force 852 bomber collided over Palomares with a refuelling aircraft and lost its cargo of four hydrogen bombs in 1966 — an incident that brought chaos to the tiny farming village. Three bombs fell on the village, and one in the water. None exploded but some radioactivity leaked.

“The United States never made proper compensation for that mishap and I got eight months in jail for my trouble,” she said. After her release she spent six years in selfimposed exile in France until General Franco’s death. She said the aristoc-

racy in countries such as France and Germany had tried to adapt to modern realities, but Spain’s nobility was still living in a world of past grandeur.

She said her sympathies were still with the Left, but she did not think democracy was achieving its objectives. “People want to live the way they imagine we do, fanning themselves all day and being served whisky by servants in livery,” she said. Democracy encouraged people to vote, not to work.

“It’s like playing Russian roulette, with your country’s destiny as the stakes.”