“I swear to you, and this is what a gypsy tells you, that you will pay for the suffering of my daughter on a day like today, Isabel Pantoja, for the rest of your life.” It is the phrase that many people have attributed to Lola Flores, a sentence that she coined in June 1978 before kissing her thumb. La Faraona was thus responding to the culmination of a love story that was highly covered in the media at that time that ended with a broken and very hurt heart: that of her daughter, Lolita Flores.
TardeAR, Telecinco’s evening show, has recovered this Friday afternoon the story of the alleged curse that Lola Flores placed on Isabel Pantoja for snatching her daughter’s partner: Francisco Rivera Pérez, Paquirri. The program, presented on the last day of broadcast of the week by Frank Blanco, even revealed that both artists made peace before Flores’ death in 1995.
To understand the context of the alleged curse, we must look back more than 40 years. It was between the late 70s and early 80s that gossip magazines began to echo a possible romantic relationship between Lolita Flores and Paquirri. The singer herself told La Noria in December 2010 that she approached the bullfighter at the Seville Fair, after he separated from Carmina Ordoñez.
However, Pantoja soon ended up winning the right-handed man’s heart and starring in one of the most mediatic romances of the century, to Lolita’s sadness and Lola’s annoyance. It was in June 1978, during the debut of the Pharaoh’s daughter at Florida Park in Madrid, that Paquirri and Isabel sat in the front row during her concert. Hurt by the state in which her daughter was left, the singer and dancer spoke the aforementioned words.
At all times, Lolita defended that there was no curse, and that her mother was simply very upset by Isabel’s behavior. “The only thing she said was that she wanted to see Isabel cry everything that her daughter had cried with Paquirri. That’s not a curse. That’s just seeing your daughter ruined. I don’t like her talking about it. That everything that is happening to Isabel is blamed on Lola Flores seems very strong to me,” she commented on Traveling with Chester.
However, TardeAR uncovered some images that unraveled a possible reconciliation. It was in October 1991, seven years after Paquirri’s death, that the three involved in this case were photographed together. The captures show Pantoja and La Faraona holding hands, even sharing nail color, while a few steps later was Lolita, in a joint scene where even the children of both singers appeared.
