On August 4, 1973, the then princes of Spain, Juan Carlos and Sofía, accompanied by their children, Elena, Cristina and Felipe, who were then 9, 8 and 5 years old, entered the Marivent Palace for the first time. Fifty years later, the site is still the official summer residence of the royal family, but the time is long gone when it was also the setting for family reunions and meetings of the previous kings with invited personalities from all over the world. the world.
“I was very small, I was five years old but I have very beautiful memories” said the King last Monday during his visit to the Alfàbia gardens when asked about that distant summer of 1973: “Time passes very quickly”. And, especially so fast if we compare those summers in which the kings Juan Carlos and Sofía, as they said then, “moved their residence from Zarzuela to Marivent” where, including some escapades of the now emeritus, they spent more than a month At mallorca. A time in which the so-called “summer diplomacy” was practiced, with invitations to heads of state, personalities, the occasional royal cousin and which also, in the late 1980s, gave rise to a court of millionaires attracted by the light, the sea and the blue blood.
Marivent will be linked forever, not only with the previous formation of the royal family, with the best summer images of the years, more or less happy, of Carlos and Diana, then Princes of Wales. His stay in Mallorca, with excursions on the Fortuna, ended the estrangement between the Spanish and English families after an entanglement with Gibraltar, and the consequent anger between the Spanish and British governments, prevented the presence of Juan Carlos and Sofía in Carlos and Diana’s wedding.
Juan Carlos, Sofía and their children began to spend the summer in Mallorca at the suggestion of Nicolás de Cotoner, Marquis of Móndejar, a Mallorcan by birth, at that time head of the House of the Prince and, later, of the House of the King. The first years they settled in the Victoria apartments, located on the Paseo Marítim.
Mondéjar, who, like so many others who lived through the Franco regime and watched over the future of Juan Carlos, saw clearly that he had to provide the then young prince with his own life and stages, far from the Pazo de Meirás, and schemed with whom he had to scheme, so that The Marivent Palace, a residence that the heirs of the painter Juan Saridakis had ceded to the then Balearic Islands Council to be converted into a museum, was ceded for use in the summer by the then princes. Three years later, Juan Carlos and Sofía were already kings of and in Marivent.
It was an enclosure, on the outskirts of Palma, next to the Porto Pi naval base, with a main residence, service quarters and a piece of land that opened up to the sea, to which, over the years, services belonging to the residence of the Head of State and, later, according to the family needs of the princesses Elena and Cristina, and the then Prince. Marivent saw the current king and his sisters grow up, who enjoyed the night in Palma and excursions at sea. Summer, Marivent and the royal family were, until the arrival of the 21st century, an indivisible trio.
And, in that came the matrimonial crisis of the dukes of Lugo, the fall of those of Palma, the private vacations of Felipe and Letizia far from Palma, and, most importantly, the deterioration of the image of King Juan Carlos that did not come back nor in summer despite his victories in the regattas and his greater visibility. Marivent stopped receiving big-name guests, except for a courtesy visit from Michelle Obama in 2010 and little else.
Since 2014, after the proclamation of the King, Marivent is no longer Marivent, now it is, in addition to Queen Sofia’s refuge, the place where Kings Felipe and Letizia spend a few days on official vacations as a prologue to their private vacations, almost always away from the island. Meanwhile, some political groups and part of Balearic society have rescued an old demand so that fifty years later Saridakis’ wish is fulfilled and Marivent is opened to the public as a museum. Actually it already is.
