It is not often that you see Francisco Rivera in the city where his father took the alternative. He was at the Monumental in 1966. Although he says that he visits Barcelona on occasion for business meetings, his presence in the neighboring municipality of Badalona is certainly a novelty. Together with his wife, the designer Lourdes Montes, he has inaugurated the Banak flagship store, the largest in all of Europe for the veteran Valencian interior design firm.
Banak is decorating the Sevillian house of the Rivera Montes family and thanks to the bullfighter’s voracious involvement in choosing furniture, his wife has discovered a new line of business. Ruth Ros, director of Marketing and Communication of the brand, advances that Lourdes Montes is going to design a capsule collection of cushions. “At a meeting with the interior designers that Ruth was also in, I jokingly asked Fran if she could pick something and she replied, ‘How about the sofa cushions?’ This is how the idea of ​​making a collection that will come out in autumn was bornâ€, confirms the designer, who has been involved since January in the sixth collection of flamenco dresses with her signature, Miabril.
As the couple walks the two floors of the store, she evokes the baby moment when she sees cribs and children’s bedrooms. Parents of Carmen (7) and Curro (4), she misses her first months. Francisco, 49, can’t see himself having more children: “I’m already on my way to being a papuchi: next year I’ll turn ham around,” the right-hander jokes. The journalist Toni DÃaz throws them a cushion while he asks out loud if they sleep making a spoon or a spoon. Francisco clarifies how difficult it is to get close when the youngest of his two sons crosses each night.
They have been together for twelve years and their stability, despite the fact that some gave them twelve days, Fran jokes, is crisis-proof. Those who have lived –overcome thanks to putting a lot of love and no selfishness, that is their recipe– has strengthened them as a couple. La Vanguardia proposes a game: what is the best of the other and what should be improved. Lourdes begins: “I like what a good father he is and how easy it is to live with him: he is very flexible and makes everything very comfortable. But he should pay more attention. For example, he assures me that he has told me things that he has not told me. Her husband defends himself: “Because I think about it and if I forget later, I am convinced that I did say it. From Lourdes I adore her principles and values. As a mother, I don’t even tell you and as a woman, how she fights for everything, for her family, for me. He is zero selfish â€.
There is no way to get an assessment of the current relationship between his brother Cayetano and the Portuguese presenter MarÃa Cerqueira from the right-hander. In any case, the couple agrees that the separation of Cayetano and Eva González will not affect their respective children, who will continue to relate as always: “We have a very good relationship and we will be family all our lives,” they say in unison.
There is another issue that regularly affects Francisco: the statements that his cousin Canales Rivera has been making on sets and that can be summed up as having hindered his bullfighting career. It is fair to say that the right-hander is reluctant to enter the rag, but a certain phrase that Lourdes pronounces achieves a similar effect to the one he achieved by waving his crutch before the bull.
“Indirectly I have fed a lot of people, I mean those who talk about me when I don’t go on TV to talk about any of them. Look, the bull doesn’t give anyone anything. He doesn’t know if you’re dark, blond, tall Low, if you have money. The bull doesn’t care about all that. The only thing that matters is what you know how to do in front of him. I have never asked anyone for help; they may criticize my professional career but I have stood up every afternoon and what I have achieved has been with my effort, work and blood. And no one can take that away from me”.
Francisco Rivera prefers not to comment on the recent cover of Hello! with Isabel Pantoja wrapped in a cloak because she gives him “bad energy.” But the splinter of her inheritance… There it is. The tonadillera has always ignored both Paquirri’s last will and her sentence that in 1994 forced her to give Fran and Cayetano the batch of personal belongings that her father bequeathed to them. Many years later, she closed the matter, arguing that those bullfighting suits and gear disappeared after a robbery in Cantora. Her son Kiko would later deny it. “I am a Christian and I believe that when you die there is an after. In the conversation that this lady will have with my father, I would not like to be her. If something happened to me, I don’t imagine that Lourdes would deprive my daughter Cayetana of memories of her father. And it is that depriving two children of their father’s memories of her … That is not from being good people â€.
