A historic house, a charming garden and the perfect setting to celebrate weddings and events”. This is how the Alfabia gardens are defined on their official website. And that was this Monday the incomparable setting chosen by the Royal Family for their traditional meeting with the press during their stay in Mallorca. Shortly after eight in the evening, Don Felipe, Doña Letizia, along with Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía, posed smiling in those spectacular gardens located in the Bunyola garden, which have been Unesco Intangible Heritage since 2011 and which They have the spectacular Tramuntana mountains as a backdrop, undoubtedly the Mallorcan rural enclave preferred by the monarchs for their ‘agroposados’.
The four illustrious visitors were received by the Zaforteza family, owners of the estate since 1700, and during their tour they were able to see, among other historical curiosities, the bed in which Queen Elizabeth II of Spain slept in 1860. The King, dressed in white pants and a linen shirt in a ‘degradé’ blue tone, highlighted how “beautiful” the enclave was.
The Queen, with loose hair in which a lock of gray hair stood out, chose a low-cut fuchsia summer dress with straps and the same Ibizan espadrilles from other years. Her daughters wore half-sleeved dresses, Leonor’s green, Sofia’s printed, and wedge espadrilles that made them taller than her mother. During their tour, the Royal Family posed in different enclaves in a relaxed and complicit manner.
The Monarchs choose a Unesco Intangible Heritage orchard as the setting for the official start of their vacation
The evening perch rounded off an intense day that had begun in the morning with the arrival of the King at the Yacht Club to take the helm of his boat. Three fewer crew members and a lot of ‘love handles’ out… In total about 300 kilos. That is what the Aifos has ‘lost weight’ this year, the TP-52 sailboat of the Spanish Navy with which King Felipe competes since Monday in the bay of Palma within the 41st edition of the Copa del Rey Mapfre sailing .
The intention is to optimize it and make it more competitive. Perhaps because as Emerico Fuster, president of the Real Club Náutico de Palma, said. “This year the King has to win the Cup.” A trophy that he has not yet lifted.
The question was: But does the monarch really have a ship to aspire to victory? The answer is that this year yes. “At least, to make a podium”, qualifies Alejandro Varela, communication director of a regatta that in this edition has 100 boats, 1,500 sailors from 17 countries and eight categories, one of them female.
Don Felipe, ready to beat copper in the sea at the helm of the sailboat of the Spanish Armada
The curious note is that three of these boats suffered the “interaction” (in ecological language) of a gang of orcas when they were sailing towards Mallorca. The desire to play of these restless cetaceans caused the rudder of the sailboat Kapote, from Puerto de Santa María, to break, which at the height of Estepona had to ask for help from Salvamento Marítimo. In the Palma regatta, this type of incident is not expected, “because luckily the orcas do not enter the bays, they act in the open sea,” says Varela.
beat the copper
With the same ambition as always, but with more determination than ever, don Felipe is ready to fight for the copper in the sea against his other 15 Majorica ORC1 class opponents, between now and August 5th. To do this, he began testing Aifos already on Friday, the eve of official training, and it is expected that this year he will race every day.
At the moment in the first day he was fourth, 2.5 points from the podium. For her part, on Sunday night, the Queen offered the first summer image of her presiding over the closing ceremony of the Atlàntida Film Fest in Palma, where she presented a trophy to the French-Swiss actress Irène Jacob.
Already fully installed in the Marivent Palace, the Royal Family arrives on an island that does not suffer from the tourist overflow registered last year in the midst of the post-pandemic holiday fever. “Mallorca has an occupation this summer around five percent less than usual,” acknowledges Toni Ferrer, general director of the prestigious five-star GPRO Valparaíso Palace.
quality tourism
At the same time, the island is giving way to a new quality tourism, more elitist and select… Less famous perched on the beach and more billionaires wanting to seclude themselves in some privileged inland enclave.
“We are becoming the new Monaco,” says public relations Tommy Ferragut, a benchmark in Palma’s social life. “The difference – he qualifies – is that here it is about discreet luxury, without ostentation, the Mallorcan idiosyncrasy of a lifetime.”
The very discreet passage of Miguel Bosé on the island serves to perfectly illustrate this new trend. Dedicated to reading, cooking and playing with his children, Bosé has enjoyed a peaceful retirement in the Mallorcan countryside for a few days.
Along the same lines, Ana Obregón, once an icon of the crazy Balearic summer with her strident poses in a bikini, now seeks peace and anonymity as a devoted grandmother in her chalet on the Costa de los Pinos…
It remains to be seen if this Monday’s inn will give way to more meetings of the Royal Family with the press or if, on the contrary, they too will be swept away by this new trend towards invisibility that has taken hold on the island.
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