In 2017, the province of Catalonia held an independence vote that was technically illegal, and the national police forces responded with violence. Though Spain was able to join the European common market, the Great Recession caused a housing crisis that did extensive damage to the country’s economy and standard of living. Through the legend of Juan Carlos’s return, the Spanish royal family became a metonym for a changed Spain, but the 21st century has battered the myth’s appeal. It’s more reminiscent of Vladimir Putin or Robert Mugabe, rulers who became unimaginably wealthy on the backs of struggling nations. (Even the queen reportedly has a few.) But using the connections from an official role to enrich yourself while building a system of foreign bank accounts doesn’t sound like the behavior of a democratic hero. Increasingly, offshore accounts are used by the world’s rich to drive a defensive tax strategy. “He wants to guarantee during his own lifetime that his children and his children’s children will never know the financial humiliations his parents and grandparents knew,” a person acquainted with Juan Carlos’s finances told V.F. Ultimately that experience shaped his approach toward making money. When he was educated in Spain as a child in the 1950s, some of his expenses were provided for by the dictator Franco, who wanted to groom him as a successor. Alfonso and his son Juan left with little wealth, and the family would spend most of Juan Carlos’s childhood dependent on support from other Spanish aristocrats who had also found themselves in exile in Italy, where Juan Carlos was born. estimated that his net worth was about $2 billion, all acquired in the years since he made his return to Spain in 1948. From the beginning of his reign, Juan Carlos paid taxes on his income and was never the personal owner of any of the royal art collection, regalia, or palaces.

Because his grandfather King Alfonso XIII was exiled at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Juan Carlos has fewer jewels and heirlooms that Queen Elizabeth, for example, has turned into a modern nest egg. The main difference between the Spanish royal family and the British comes in their financial relationship to the state. The source said that the event had only strengthened his bond with his country.

In 1992-the year Spain celebrated its political and economic transformation by hosting the Summer Olympics- Vanity Fair spoke to a source who was at the palace with Juan Carlos that night. By outsmarting a group of military leaders who had taken the country’s parliamentarians at gunpoint, he helped to establish Spain as a country that could deliver peace and prosperity to citizens who had long been deprived of it. Eventually he let go of those autocratic powers and helped guide the country toward democracy, becoming a historical oddity: The rare person in power who wanted less to do.īut in 1981, when he defended the fledgling democracy against a well-organized military coup, he became something more like a living legend. Ascending to the throne in 1975 as the appointed successor to dictator Francisco Franco, Juan Carlos at first had the ability to select political leaders without holding elections.

Juan Carlos I of Spain, the country’s king until his abdication in 2014, was supposed to go down in the history books as a hero.

Will juan spain disgraced king get