This is going to be an unusual summer for the royal family. Before the end of August, the King will have to attend the round of consultations to propose a candidate for the presidency of the government; Princess Leonor will enter the General Military Academy of Zaragoza on August 17 and shortly after, Infanta Sofía will travel to Wales to begin the first year of the International Baccalaureate at Atlantic College. The stay of the Kings, the Princess and the Infanta in Marivent will necessarily be brief and there are no more plans than those that are traced from what was programmed in other years.
The first verification is that the King has arrived on the island, as in previous years, ahead of the rest of his family. Felipe VI entered Marivent, where Queen Sofía and Princess Irene of Greece have been for a week, last Wednesday afternoon. Regarding Queen Letizia, the only certainty is that she will appear in public this Sunday to close the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Festival.
To see Princess Leonor and her sister, Sofía, we will have to wait for the call for the traditional summer inn or, failing that, for a private exit as long as it can be witnessed by the stubborn photojournalists, attentive to any movement of the family outside the walls of the Marivent complex.
It was precisely the work of a group of photographers, tireless roadrunners, that yesterday made it possible to discover that the King, after receiving the representatives of the Balearic institutions at the Almudaina Palace, went out to sea. Felipe VI, already in a private plan, accepted the invitation of a group of his friends who have rented the Windrose of Amsterdam boat (Rose of the Winds of Amsterdam). The impressive sailboat, 40 meters long and with two masts, was anchored in the bay of Palma and the King boarded it from an inflatable boat with which he left the Porto Pi naval base. The sailboat, which flies the Maltese flag and is owned by a Dutch technology entrepreneur who rents it out when he is not using it, sailed from the coast of Palma to the coast of Andratx to later make the return route with several people on board. The voyage coincided with lunchtime and although the rough sea and strong wind were not the most suitable for a quiet lunch, they were for the enjoyment of good lovers of extreme sailing.
Felipe VI’s sea tour coincided, crossing the Mediterranean and the Peninsula, with the time in which King Juan Carlos was training yesterday on board the Bribón in the waters of the Pontevedra estuary. Without being sought, the coincidence ended up putting, once again, the focus on the evident fact that both King Juan Carlos and King Felipe share, at least, their fondness for nautical sports and for the sea that their father instilled in their son, following the family tradition.
This paternal-filial inheritance has no continuity in the two daughters of King Felipe, too young in the years in which grandmother Sofía financed the sailing courses at the Calanova school, in Mallorca, for the rest of her grandchildren. Neither Leonor nor Sofía seem inclined to water sports and they have rarely been seen on a boat beyond their occasional visits to the Aifos, the Navy sailboat with which the King competes in the Copa del Rey Mapfre, and the few occasions in which they have made the crossing from Mallorca to Cabrera.
To date, all the appearances of Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía in Mallorca, since they were babies, have been on the mainland and in the company of their parents, Felipe and Letizia, sometimes only with their mother and on some occasions , the least, all with Queen Sofia.
The King’s mother has not yet appeared on the island where she arrived on the 20th. It is expected that on August 3 she will be together with the kings Felipe and Letizia, host of the reception that will be offered to Balearic authorities and civil society in the gardens of Marivent. There are no more events planned in the summer calendar of the Kings in Mallorca, beyond the impression that this year her stay is going to be shorter and more absent.
