Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaronminki listener discretion is advised. In the hills of Catalonia, the region of Spain, to the northeast, close to the border with France, there's a small town called La Bisba Demporta. It's not a frequent stop for most tourists. The town is quaint but a little run down. A dry riverbed, grassy and derelict runs through the town center, a place where a weekly market appears.
A few tents and carts people selling mostly crafts and ceramics. There's a pub there in town, a restaurant and bar called El Drac with a large outdoor seating area that sprawls onto the sidewalk. According to trip Advisory views, it's not a bad place to stop were a quick bite or something to drink. Trish gave it five stars. In her review, she wrote quote the restaurant itself is very atmospheric, with original stone walls, open fire, and well spaced out tables,
which I like. Another user named beck clev M had a slightly less enjoyable experience. His one star review complained quote, there was no one behind the bar for five minutes, despite we have been sitting there, and staff was walking around the bar often. Finally bartender arrived and made us drinks. The service staff seemed to be acting without organization, everyone
doing everything and nothing. I wonder if that clev M might have felt differently if he had asked around, if he had maybe turned to a local next to him and inquired who exactly Aldrack was employing as servers. If he looked closely, he might have seen a few things that made Aldrac unique. The walls were peppered with framed newspaper articles and a framed book cover. They had a sandwich on the menu called the Monarch, and one of the servers, a man named Albert Sola, answered to a
specific nickname from drinkers at the bar. The regulars all called him the Little King. Albert looks younger than his sixty five years. He has a full head of salt and pepper hair, re seating slightly at the sides into a deep widow's peak. His eyes are close set, deep and intelligent, and his nose is long with a patrician curve.
It's the nose in particular that I think makes Albert Sola most closely resemble the former King of Spain, Juan Carlos the First, who abdicated the throne in twenty fourteen amidst a flurry of scandals, and for the past few years Juan Carlos has been deflecting the possibility of yet another scandal. Albert Sola, the waiter at Eldrach, claims to be the former king's son, and not just his son.
According to Albert Sola's birth certificate, he would be the king's oldest son, older than Juan Carlos's son Philippe, who was sent to the throne in two thousand fourteen as Philippe the Sixth. Now on this podcast, I have covered more than a few stories of royal pretenders. There was the Tickborne claimant, the Australian man who came to England claiming to be the long missing Roger Tickborn, heir to
his family's barancy, presumed dead in a shipwreck. Then there was the woman who appeared in Bristol in eighteen seventeen who spoke in a made up language and declared that
she was Princess Cariboo of a far away island. And throughout the centuries a number of royal children whom history acknowledged to be dead, like Marie Antoinette's son and the royal Romanov Princess Anastasia, have been the subject of numerous hoaxes, with actors and grifters appearing and proclaiming that they've been alive this whole time, living lives of secret poverty, waiting
for their chance to re emerge. You, the listener, are, of course welcome to believe whatever you want, although I think I would be remiss in my duties as the host of this podcast if I didn't tell you that, in my professional opinion, all of the people who pretend to be the lost of Fa Louis or Anastasia Romanov are just factually, on the evidence lying, and that the man who claimed to be Roger Tickborne was actually, by all the evidence, a man named Arthur Orton, the son
of a butcher, and that, of course Princess Cariboo was complete nonsense. And so the case of Albert Silla might be the first occasion in which I think the evidence actually weighs more likely than not that a man who was working as a waiter in a restaurant for most of his adult life might actually be the previous King of Spain's oldest son. He's not necessarily the heir to the throne. He was, after all illegitimate, but certainly someone
with a claim to it. Unlike most episodes of Noble Blood, this is a modern story from the twentieth century, and a story that's ongoing, continually developing today. But it's a story that sheds a light on the problems for modern monarchies to day. Back in the sixteen hundreds, it was easy enough to shroud a king in majesty, back when the people of a kingdom would only be exposed to a king through portraitures and glamorous pageantry, and of course
the words of the trusted Church. But today journalists and internet gossip makes easy work of proving that the people who are supposed to be God's chosen rulers on earth are just as mortal in their failings as the rest of us. It's enough to make you wonder who are the real pretenders. I'm Danish wartz, and this is Noble Blood. Maybe now is as good a time as any to
go over a little bit of Spanish history. In the monarchy of Spain was overthrown in favor of the Second Spanish Republic, the former King Alfonso the third teenh went peacefully into exile. He and his two oldest sons renounced their claims to the throne and went to live in Rome.
But the Second Spanish Republic was short lived. There was an election for a Constitutional Cortes, a group to rewrite the constitution of Spain with progressive reforms, and those reforms included the separation of church and state, forbidding religious teachings in public schools. But Spain was still an incredibly Catholic country and the Republican prime minister at the time was
religious himself. He resigned and another prime minister, the more liberal Azagna, was eventually ousted in an election in favor of a right winger, Laurel. From that point on, there were a number of socialist uprisings throughout the country, and the factionalism among the Republicans weakened their hold on the country, which gave the military opportunity to attempt a coup. When I refer to the Republicans here, I'm not talking about
a specific political party like Republicans in America. I'm referring to the people in favor of the Second Spanish Republic, the ostensible, democratic, more progressive government of the country which was recognized internationally, but which because it contained people from across the political spectrum, failed to be united enough to
maintain control against the oncoming coup. The war between the Republicans and the military, who came to be known as the Nationalists, devastated the country with countless atrocities, massacres, and brutal attacks, including the bombing of Guernica, now immortalized in one of Pablo Picasso's most famous paintings. Eventually, the Nationalists the Spanish military, captured Barcelona and then Madrid, and their leader, Francisco Front declared victory, setting off the next several decades
of his far right authoritarian regime. I'm skating through a lot of history here very quickly, but to get back to the monarchy. Fringo was attracted to the idea of the Grand Deur of Spain, historically the pomp and pageantry of nationalist Spain, and he hated the idea of a democratic republic forming after he was gone, and so he decided he would reinstate the monarchy. At this point, the grandson of Alfonso was living in Rome, a man named Juan Carlos, and so Franco brought the Prince Juan Carlos
back to Spain and named him his heir. Franco imagined that Juan Carlos would be something of his protege and would continue on his authoritarian regime after his death. Well, Franco died, but then Juan Carlos did something un expected.
Rather than carry on the dictatorship, to the surprise of Spain and the rest of the world, King Juan Carlos the first ushered democracy into Spain, spearheading the first democratic election in the country since the nineteen thirties and facing down the ensuing right wing military coup that was attempted
in the aftermath. It's almost difficult to overstate what an incredible thing Juan Carlos did, how he peacefully unraveled decades of authoritarianism and ushered in a new era of Spain in which the nation would be democratic and participatory in the economy of the rest of the world. He was a hero beloved by two generations of grateful Spaniards still reckoning with the trauma of Franco's authoritarian regime. Juan Carlos was a king who could have become an autocrat, but
instead gave a country back to its people. Later, King Juan Carlos would have another admittedly smaller scale hero moment when he went viral in two thousand seven at a summit in Chile when he told the then President of Venezuela, Hugoshavez, why don't you shut up? But the goodwill towards the
King of Spain would soon run out. In twent twelve, King Juan Carlos went on a secret vacation, a vacation that would have remained secret had he not injured himself and need to be airlifted out to receive an emergency hip replacement. The king was in Botswana hunting elephants. Now, that would have been bad enough, but every new detail about the story that emerged just made the situation worse
and worse. Spain was in a massive economic downturn, a period of huge unemployment in aftermath of the two thousand eight global recession. This little elephant hunting vacation cost over forty thousand euros, and it was subsidized by an adviser to the Saudi royal family with ced ties to fifteen offshore companies named in the Panama papers. And on this pretty dodgy vacation, the King wasn't accompanied by the Queen Sophia, the mother of his children. He was with a woman
named Corina Zussain Wittenstein, a German princess by marriage. The media in Spain had been historically very generous in their coverage of the royal family. A reporter from The New Yorker once wrote that he was told by a newspaper editor that he and his peers quote exercise self censorship
on the subject of the king. When the New Yorker reporter wrote an article alluding to one of the king's alleged numerous rumored affairs, one of the journalists with whom he had spoken felt so guilty and nervous for the future of his own career that he called the chief of the royal household to apologize. But after the elephant hunting incident, it seemed like the royal family was stuck
on a treadmill with a speed that kept increasing. When the King tried to downsize by giving up his eighteen million euro yacht, it just brought more attention to the fact that he had an eighteen million euro yacht. To begin with, and that it cost twenty thousand euros just to staff it, and that it had been a gift by an assortment of twenty five random businessmen and the
Blair government. For all of the king's relatively progressive politics, je Carlos had a bad habit of accepting exorbitant gifts and swaddling himself with the luxe jury that maybe he felt he had been denied as a child in exile. Royal biographer Lawrence Debray wrote that one Carlos quote had known as a young man the humiliation of having to economically depend on rich Spanish aristocrats who were voluntarily ensuring
the lifestyle of the royal family in exile. That stress or anxiety, no doubt shaped his magpie like tendency to hoard wealth, but it didn't make it any less palatable to a modern and struggling Spanish population. In the twenty one century, the snowball of scandals were just too much
for the monarchy to bear. In the Prime Minister announced that the king had told him that he intended to abdicate, and later in that year, Juan Carlos the First did just that, becoming the fourth European monarch to app decay in just over a year after Pope Benedict sixteenth, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and King Albert the Second of Belgium. It was a reckoning for the monarchies of Europe, a global moment of modernism colliding with an inherently regressive institution.
To survive, monarchies needed to adapt, to become likable, likable multi multimillionaires to whom people need to bow when they enter a room. It's a tricky order. Youth and good looks help more progressive politics due too, although not too progressive as to not alienate the traditional base who make up the support for having a monarchy at all in
the first place. It seems, in my estimation at least, that many of the present day European monarchies recognized the utility in a shift towards what I consider a sort of kitch, the sale of tea towels and china plates with their faces painted on them, the monarch becoming less a political power and more a mascot, someone that the country can unite behind, much in the same way a crowd at a football game can get excited about a guy dancing in a tiger costume for the crowns of Europe.
It was a moment of adapt or die. The new King of Spain, Phillip the six, was handsome and comparatively unadorned by scandal, and the country was further indeared to him by his marriage to a beautiful non royal woman who had worked as a news reporter. Now our story requires us to go back in time once again, to nine fifty six in Barcelona, where a baby was born
and given the name Alberto Fernando Augusto back Roman. Alberto, who would eventually begin going by Albert, was one of the hundred thousand children orphaned during the Franco regime, not all infants whose parents had died, but also children whose parents were political enemies or unwed mothers in the deeply Catholic country, mothers who smuggled their children out of their homes to be raised by different families. As an infant, Albert was sent to the island of Babitha to be
cared for it by a poor farming family. The daughter of that family is still alive. Her name is Yulalia, and she's ninety years old now. She recounted how her family had frequently fostered children from the mainland, illegitimate children of powerful families usually, but Albert's case was peculiar from the start. According to Yulalia, they were paid almost twice their usual rate to care for him, given almost three
hundred pas a month. As a young boy, Albert was taken from Abatha and brought to live in a mansion in Barcelona. Although the force behind these movements and machinations weren't clear then and still aren't clear to Albert today, all he has to go on are his hazy half memories in Barcelona. He remembers the manner he lived at had a garden and high walls, and that an older woman would come and visit him, bringing him toys. He
believes now the woman might have been his grandmother. A tutor would come to the house to teach him, and he lived in the mansion in Barcelona until age eight, when he was sent to the home of a farmer named Salva Torsola in the province of Hurona. A whisper followed him there, a whisper that he was noble, born a child of an important family. It was that whisper that Albert clung to as his life became even stranger, more inexplicably charmed. After Albert got his driver license, a
mysterious gift appeared, an expensive motorcycle and a car. When Albert served his mandatory military service in his twenties, he was given cushy preferential treatment. He was even given a chartered helicopter to take home to visit family after one of his relatives was injured in an accident. Eventually, Albert would begin working as a waiter at the job he
would keep for his entire life. But he remained curious about his childhood, his origins, the way good things just tended to follow him, and why he had faint memories of a woman in a garden who looked like the by then deceased mother of the King. In two Albert took his curiosity to a local office in Barcelona that specialized in finding adoption records. Albert waited while several of their employees were called over to look at his files. There was speaking behind lifted hands, a visit to the
manager in the back of the office. Finally, the manager emerged to tell Albert that they couldn't help him, but the manager did give Albert one cryptic piece of information that this was the most complicated adoption case that they had ever seen. Albert has decades of stories of gossip following him, of powerful people telling him that he came from a powerful family. He made a claim in court to see his birth records, a claim that got no
official response. Finally, off the record, Albert was given the answer that he had waited for his entire life. The judge on his case called him privately after hours and told him that he was the son of King Juan Carlos, the first an illegitimate child. That the king had it eighteen before he married Queen Sophia several years later. Later, that judge would deny making the phone call at all, but in Albert's mind the case was solved. He was
the king's son and the king's oldest son. In two thousand and seven, Albert sent a handwritten letter by facts to Zezuela Palace. It began, dear Father. Someone in the palace responded and told Albert that his letter would be forwarded along to the king. But Albert waited and waited, and no response came, And so Albert continued to write letters. Give me some answers, and I will not bother you again. One of the letters read my patients has run out.
Albert wasn't asking for money or to claim the throne. He just wanted answers and maybe a chance to get to the father that he had been missing his entire life. Albert requested DNA and a paternity lawsuit, both of which
were denied. When Juan Carlos the First was king, he had full protection under sovereign immunity from both civil and criminal lawsuits, but the question became a little trickier after Juan Carlos abdicated and Albert Sola isn't the only person claiming to be an illegitimate child of the former king. A Belgian woman named Ingrid Sartua born in nineteen sixty six, claims that she's the King's daughter, born from an affair
that the king had in France with her mother Lilian. Allegedly, Lilian turned down royal offers to get an illegal abortion, and because bearing a child out of wedlock would have been dangerous and Franco Spain, Lilian smuggled her infant daughter to Belgium. Lilian had told young Ingrid for her entire life that her father had died in a plane crash, until finally she believed that her child was old enough
to hear the truth. As with Albert's, all of Ingrid's legal avenues to try to get an answer as to our paternity hit dead ends. But then the parent decided to test their DNA against one another's. An independent agency in Belgium verified the results. The two Ingrid and Albert are most likely have siblings. It makes a certain kind of sense. I mean, for centuries, kings had been having
affairs and having illegitimate children. If you're a fan of this podcast, you're probably well aware that that's just sort of what kings do. But that type of behavior looks a little different in the twenty first century, and the incredibly self serious question of the quote unquote legitimacy of claims to the thrones of Europe seem almost even a little silly in a world of Wikipedia and books being
delivered to our front doors via drone. Personally, I would welcome someone who had spent a lifetime in the service industry becoming the king of a nation. It seems to me that a server would have the best ability to actually well serve the people, and not just provide lip service to that effect while smiling for the cameras. Albert Solo may never become the King of Spain, but he'll always be the little King to the patrons at his bar.
That's the still unfolding story of the possible illegitimate son of the former King of Spain. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear yet another scandal Juan Carlos got himself into. And just on a personal note, I want to thank everyone so much for all the
support they throw to the show. Everyone over on the Patreon Just a reminder, we're on patreon dot com slash Noble Blood Tales, where you can get episode scripts and bonus episodes like where I go through episodes of The Tutors on Showtime and the television show Rain about Mary, Queen of Scott's on the CW. We also have merch at d F TB a dot com. I'm linking that in the episode description. And also I'm leading a pilgrimage
to Sussex this spring in April. I think there might still be a few spots left if you sign up soon. It's a pilgrimage to discuss the works of Mary Shelley, particularly Frankenstein, to walk to talk to read. I think it's going to be a really great experience. Now I would be so excited to meet any listeners in person, so that's very exciting. And also, oh gosh, Anatomy the book that I've been yammering on about forever. It's a novel about the dawn of surgery in nineteenth century Scotland.
It finally comes out January, and thank you so much to anyone who has already pre ordered it. If it interests you at all, it would mean the world to me. If you take a look, if you like this podcast, I think you'll really like it. Even after Juan Carlos abdicated from the throne, he still managed to find trouble.
The Supreme Court in Spain was forced to open a preliminary investigation about the former king's involvement in the building of a high speed rail in Saudi Arabia after a Swiss newspaper reported that when Juan Carlos was king, he had received a hundred million dollars in kickbacks from the Saudi king. While this was coming to light, the former Spanish king literally disappeared from the country for three weeks,
no one in the world knew who he was. The media speculator did that he was in the Dominican Republic or maybe Portugal. The only clue was an enigmatic goodbye letter that he wrote to his son, the current King, Philippe the sixth. Three weeks later, after the former king of Spain was missing for three weeks, the Palace confirmed his whereabouts. He was in the United Arab Emirates, where he remains today under self imposed exile. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
from Aaron Minky. The show was written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by rima Ill Kali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H