Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK
For members

HISTORY

The one thing to know about each of Spain’s ‘crazy’ kings and queens

Which Spanish king thought he was a frog? Who was a reputed sex addict? Understanding Spanish history can be tough, so we've broken it down into the most important and quirky trivia you need to know about each Spanish king and queen.

Published: 12 May 2023 15:55 CEST
The one thing to know about each of Spain's 'crazy' kings and queens
Jailed by Napoleon (Fernando VII), mentally and physically challenged due to generations of inbreeding (Carlos II) and exiled under the pretence of being a 'nympho' (Isabel II). Spanish royal family history is certainly very...colourful.

Isabel I and Fernando V of Castilla (The Catholic Monarchs): They paid for Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America and united Spain
The first monarchs of post-Moorish Spain, Isabel and Fernando unified Spain after the Reconquista, ordered the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors and funded Christopher Columbus’s alternate journey to what the explorer thought were the Indies. Fernando was the ruler of the Kingdom of Aragón and Isabel of Castilla, meaning that their marriage united these two huge areas, encompassing much of modern-day Spain.

Juana I of Castilla (The Mad) and Felipe I of Castilla (The Handsome): She probably wasn’t crazy and he may have been poisoned
Daughter of Isabel and Fernando, Juana was known as La Loca and kept prisoner for 46 years at Tordesillas Palace due to an alleged mental disorder, which was quite possibly a strategic excuse by power-hungry relatives. Felipe V didn’t fare much better. His death at aged just 28 was so sudden that the rumour spread that his father-in-law had poisoned him.

Carlos I (The Emperor): The ‘Caesar’ who was born in a latrine 
The second son of Juana I and Felipe I had some rather ‘humble beginnings’, as his mother unknowingly gave birth to him in a latrine in the Belgian city of Gent. He was however to become the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, King of Spain, Lord of the Netherlands and Duke of Burgundy, showcasing how Spain was a world force at the time. 

Felipe II (The Prudent): He had loads of kids and took over Portugal
Felipe II of Spain had 11 recognised offspring, but it’s more likely to have been at least 15 when factoring in his affairs. He obviously wasn’t called The Prudent because of his propensity to father children, but rather because he is said to have thought through every decision carefully, including annexing Portugal to Spain when the neighbouring country’s king died without leaving heirs. 

Felipe III (The Pious): Aloof and a gambler

Third in line to the throne, Philip III’s two older siblings died leaving him unwillingly in charge when his father passed in 1598. Despite his nickname suggesting he had no vices, some historical records have him down as a gambler who lost lots of money to his courtesans when playing cards. Felipe III placed all important affairs in the hands of the Duke of Lerma at a time when Spain had economic problems and its fingers in many pies: Naples, Portugal, Sicily and Milan to name a few.

Felipe IV (The Great or the Planet King): Art lover and witness to declining empire
His other nickname was the ‘Gob-smacked King’, given that the notorious facial features that were a product of decades of Habsburg inbreeding were starting to show. ‘The Planet King’ nickname was either due to astrological reasons or because of the size of the Spanish empire at the time, as Felipe wasn’t exactly a traveller (he never left Spain). Although he was a patron of some of Spain’s greatest ever artists – Velázquez and Lope de Vega included – his 44-year reign is generally not considered to have been a successful one as Spain lost clout on the world stage.

Carlos II (The Bewitched): Famously inbred
Google “inbreeding among royals” and most of the images will be of poor Charles II of Spain and his bizarre facial features, including the so-called ‘Habsburg Jaw’ (which explains his nickname). The last monarch of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty was mentally and physically challenged, and crucially infertile. With his death in 1700, the War of Spanish Succession began.

Felipe V (The Courageous): He thought he was a frog

The founder of the current Bourbon dynasty suffered from depression and hallucinations and actually believed he was a frog, croaking and jumping throughout the palace. He also refused to change his clothes and wash for fear of being poisoned through new ones. Despite this, he ruled for 46 years with a break of just 229 days.

Luis I (The Beloved or The Liberal): Short and not-so-sweet reign 
Luis I had one of the shortest reigns in Spanish history lasting only 229 days until he died aged just 17.  

Fernando VI (The Prudent or The Just): Just as mad as his father
The fourth son of Felipe V became increasingly erratic and depressed throughout his reign culminating in what’s known as ‘the year without a king’ before his death from ‘melancholia’. It is thought he was probably also bipolar, he couldn’t sleep, barely washed, bit people in the royal court, danced publicly in his underwear and pretended he was a ghost.

Carlos III (The Politician): The man behind the Spanish lottery and flag
The third son of Felipe V to reach the throne, Charles III was determined to restore Spain’s position on the world stage, with middling success. He set up Spain’s national lottery as a way of filling the royal coffers, enforced Spanish over other languages in the Iberian peninsula and chose the red-yellow-red flag Spain has to this day.

Carlos IV (The Hunter): A hobbyist more than a king

Charles IV of Spain ascended the throne shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, which ultimately marked his unstable reign. He entrusted the ruling of Spain to politician Manuel Godoy, instead losing himself in his hobbies for most of the day: music, hunting, craftsmanship and art. It’s no surprise that his wife María Luisa is said to have confessed to a friar that none of Carlos’s heirs were actually his.

Fernando VII (The Desired or The Felon): He was overthrown and imprisoned by Napoleon
Two months after Ferdinand occupied the Spanish throne in 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded and took over and put the young king behind bars in France. When the Spanish populace rose up against the French invaders, he regained his crown from 1814 to 1833.

José I (The Intruder): He was Napoleon’s brother
Known as José I Bonaparte or José Napoleon I, he was a French politician, diplomat, lawyer, and older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was given the Spanish throne by his sibling in 1808 but offered to abdicate on four occasions.

Isabel II (The Queen of Sad Destinies or The Chaste Queen): A reputed nymphomaniac
Isabel took the throne upon the death of her father when she was just three years old, with her mother acting as regent during her childhood. She has often been portrayed as not being the sharpest tool in the shed and a nymphomaniac, but these claims were most likely embellished by political adversaries. When she was forced to abdicate and into exile in Paris, she allegedly said “I was kicked out of Spain because I had lovers”. Her husband Francisco de Asís de Borbón was known to be homosexual, even though they had 12 children together.

Amadeo I (The Knight King or The Elect): An Italian prince who grew fed up of Spain
The only Spanish monarch from the House of Savoy, Amadeus was born in Turin in Italy and was elected by the Spanish courts to be king in 1870 after they dethroned Isabel II. As soon as he reached power, his main political ally Spanish Prime Minister Juan Prim was murdered, marking the tone for three years of instability and turmoil which led Amadeo to gracefully turn down the crown of this “deeply troubled” country as he put it, and cause the first Spanish Republic to be proclaimed. 

Alfonso XII (The Pacifier): He helped repair the monarchy…and he liked sardines
Son of the dethroned Isabel II, the crown returned the House of Borbón with Alfonso XII. His ten-year reign gave hope of a stable constitutional monarchy in Spain. Alfonso died aged just 27 from tuberculosis. That didn’t give him much time to do anything that memorable, but he did famously love Málaga’s skewered sardines, known as espetos.

Alfonso XIII (The African): His reign was followed by fascism
After the death of his father, Alfonso Junior was King of Spain from his birth until the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, but had to wait to officially take the throne when aged 16. His reign was rife with social and political problems with ultimately led to the fascist Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He got his nickname ‘The African’ due to Spain’s 1920s Rif War for colonial rule over northern Morocco, which anti-monarchists blamed him for. 

Juan Carlos I: The Rascal?
The father of Spain’s current king. Despite being lauded for supporting Spain’s Transition into democracy after Franco’s dictatorship, he abdicated in favour of his son Felipe VI after a botched elephant hunting trip in Botswana and a number of ongoing financial scandals. He now lives is self-imposed exile in Abu Dhabi. Juan Carlos was not given a sobrenombre (nickname) by the public, but he did choose to call his sailboat Bribón, which means “rascal” in Spanish. Coincidence? 

Felipe VI: Spain’s current squeaky clean king 
Tall, handsome, level-headed, he speaks seven languages – German, English, French, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish. Since being crowned in 2014, Spain’s King Felipe has done a great job in restoring the damage done to the Spanish monarchy by his father, with not a single controversy making front page news.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

SPAIN EXPLAINED

Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Despite a top secret project to build them during the dictatorship, Spaniards have never been keen on the idea of nuclear weapons, especially since the US accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Almería.

Published: 15 April 2024 16:36 CEST
Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Spain isn’t part of the reduced group of nations that have nuclear weapons, which includes European neighbours the UK and France.

It has never tested nuclear weapons, does not manufacture them, nor has it bought them from nuclear allies who make them.

Spain is still a NATO member and doesn’t shy away from involving itself in foreign policy debates, often taking positions against the mainstream.

But it has still never joined the nuclear club nor have Spaniards ever really wanted to, even though former dictator Francisco Franco had different ideas (more on that below).

In fact, Spaniards seem to have an indifferent if not abnormally negative view of nukes, largely stemming from an accident by an American air force on Spanish soil in the 1960s.

READ ALSO: How important is nuclear power to Spain?

A 2018 study on state attitudes towards nuclear weapons concluded that Spain had “little to no interest in nuclear weapons.” Yet Spain still benefits from NATO’s so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ defence and has nearby neighbours, including France and the United Kingdom, that are nuclear powers. It is also home to several American military bases.

In that sense, Spain balances a somewhat unique position of being pro-nuclear for other countries and as a broader defence deterrence at the global level, but not on Spanish territory because it knows that would not sit well with Spaniards.

But why is this? Why doesn’t Spain have nuclear weapons?

Anti-nuclear sentiment among Spaniards

According to an article for Institut Montaigne by Clara Portela, Professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the Spanish people are “sensitised on nuclear weapons, if not negatively disposed towards them.”

Much of it comes down to history and, in particular, an accident involving nuclear weapons on Spanish soil. As part of post-war defence and security agreements Spain made with the U.S, American nuclear weapons were kept on Spanish soil.

Spaniards weren’t keen on the idea. Portela notes that “their presence at the Torrejón base near Madrid was a controversial issue” among the public, but it was an accident in 1966 that really soured Spaniards to nuclear weapons after an American aircraft carrying a hydrogen bomb crashed and dropped the device in the waters near the town of Palomares off the coast of Almería.

READ ALSO: Ten of the best documentaries about Spain

The incident caused “one of the bombs to fall to the seabed and leak radioactivity” into the surrounding area, Portela states, something that would have no doubt hardened many Spaniard’s perceptions towards nuclear weapons, especially as the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still in living memory for many.

A NATO-nuclear referendum

This scepticism towards nuclear arms was solidified twenty years later in a referendum on NATO membership. Though the government of the day campaigned for continued membership of the military alliance, it made it conditional on Spain also continuing as a non-nuclear power. A clause in the referendum consultation outlined this condition: “The prohibition to install, store or introduce nuclear weapons on Spanish soil will be maintained.”

Spaniards backed their continued, non-nuclear NATO membership by 13 percent.

A year later, in 1987, Spain formally signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), further cementing its non-nuclear stance.

And that was it — with this and the result of the referendum, Portela suggests that “the issue of nuclear weapons was all but archived. It hardly re-surfaced in public debates for decades.”

An atomic bomb of the type nicknamed “Little Boy” that was dropped by a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber in 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan. (Photo by LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY / AFP)

The nuclear dictator?

Despite the Spanish public’s distrust of nuclear weapons, there was one Spaniard in particular who was quite keen on the idea: Franco.

In what may be one of the most terrifying historical ‘what ifs’ ever, the fascist dictator wanted to equip Spain with a nuclear arsenal, started a project to do so, and came very close to achieving it.

The ‘Islero Project’, as it was known, was top secret and lasted for several decades of scientific research until it was finally abandoned in the 1980s after his death.

Firstly, a brief consideration of the geopolitics of the time is worthwhile here, and it concerns the Americans again. When the Second World War ended in 1945, Spain immediately became isolated on the international stage owing to its support for Nazi Germany and fascist Spain. It was excluded from the UN and shunned as a real player in international relations.

As the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation grew throughout the 1950s, Franco’s fierce anti-communism combined with the strategic geographical positioning of Spain led the U.S. to form closer ties with the dictatorship, promising financial aid and image rehabilitation in return for allowing American military bases in Spain.

READ ALSO: Where are the US’s military bases in Spain and why are they there?

The Junta de Energía Nuclear was created in 1951, undertaking research and atomic energy development more broadly, and it sent promising researchers to study in the U.S. When they returned, the Islero project continued in secret.

Rather bizarrely, it was the accident at Palomares years later that actually gave the scientists the key to designing an atomic bomb. Unconvinced by the American’s explanations for the debacle, the Spaniards working on plans discovered the Ulam-Teller method, which was fundamental to the development of the thermonuclear bomb or H-bomb.

However, the project was then frozen by Franco himself because he feared the United States would discover that Spain was trying to develop its own atomic bomb and impose economic sanctions.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish scientists secretly restarted the project, but in 1982 the new Socialist government discovered the plans and disbanded the project. By 1987 the González government announced Spain’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT and the issue has rarely even come up as an issue since then.

And despite that, Spain is a NATO member, regularly attends the G20, and often plays a leading role on the global stage. Certain elements of the dictatorship had eyes on building a nuclear arsenal, but it never happened. Franco ultimately worried about the economic repercussions of being discovered, and Spaniards were themselves sceptical about the idea based on the experience in Palomares.

In terms of nuclear weapons, Spain is what Portela describes as a ‘de-proliferation’ state – in other words, a country that aspired to have nuclear bombs but reversed it.

It doesn’t look like changing anytime soon either. A survey in 2021 showed that Spain had the highest level of support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with a massive 89 percent majority.

READ ALSO: Why is Spain not in the G20 (but is always invited)?

SHOW COMMENTS