For weeks now, Cayetano Martínez de Irujo has been denouncing the situation in the Spanish countryside and how farmers – among whom he identifies himself – have a big problem such as water. His situation has reached such a point that he had to ask a friend for money last December to be able to request the payroll of his workers.
“We are the most affected in all of Europe. The problem is very serious,” he said just a few days ago in Espejo Público. With 800 hectares of wheat, the son of the Duchess of Alba has received 20,000 euros in aid. He wonders what the others received.
“The farmer is semi-abandoned and if I am having it this bad, imagine how medium and small farmers must be having it,” he asked himself on Susanna Griso’s program. The aristocrat has not stopped denouncing this situation, and he again gave an interview last Monday on 13TV, explaining the situation he was experiencing.
“When you depend on something alive like the field, you have to think a lot before putting the tractors out on the street; that’s why it took so long, until the situation is already desperate,” he said. However, the controversy came when he assured that he does not have the resources, once again, to pay his workers.
“What I’m going through… Whoever believes it, if they want to continue framing me where my family was or wherever they want, I don’t care. I have 40 employees, 40 families depend on me, and I don’t have to pay their salaries. For two months I don’t know where to get it,” he insisted, explaining that he has only had “30% of income” and “he has only been able to reduce 70% of expenses.”
As explained by the Duchess of Alba’s son, “the prices of diesel, fertilizers, fertilizers have gone up… All the materials necessary to treat the land. And on top of that, they want to raise the minimum wage even more and reduce the working day.” .
The Duke of Arjona kept repeating that he was “having a terrible time”, but he did “nothing but think about those 90% of people” who are below him, without possibilities. “Those who cannot obtain credit or aid will already be hungry. How will they be to have left their lands and crops to take to the streets? It is absolute desperation,” he assured.
However, the latest news related to the Duke of Arjona shows that perhaps he would have the resources to meet these payments. As has been learned, he spent the New Year holidays with his entire family – his children, Luis and Amina; his partner, Bárbara Mirjan, and his ex-wife, Genoveva Casanova, in their spectacular residence in Kenya, on the shores of the Indian Ocean.
He is also letting the mother of his children spend time sheltering from media harassment in two of his impressive properties: the Arbaizenea palace, in San Sebastián, which the aristocrat inherited from his mother, Cayetana de Alba and which was built in 1881 by order of the Duke of Sotomayor, Don Carlos Martínez de Irujo y del Alcázar; and his mansion in the luxurious La Finca urbanization, in
The Arbaizenea palace house – property that the Count of Salvatierra received when the Duchess distributed her assets among her children so that they would not oppose her wedding with Alfonso Díez – is now a property open to events, managed precisely by Genoveva Casanova.
A mansion that has been rented mainly for weddings since shortly after the death of his mother and his brother Carlos assumed the duties as head of the House of Alba, which caused Cayetano Martínez de Irujo to lose the approximately 300,000 euros he received as an allowance that his mother gave him for managing the family businesses.
