A right royal Spanish mystery

Why has King Juan Carlos of Spain gone missing? William Langley investigates the unfolding scandal, replete with unexplained fortunes and an exotic mistress.

- William Langley

On a sweltering night in early August, King Juan Carlos of Spain, once the most glamorous and admired monarch in Europe, boarded a private jet at a quiet provincial airport, and ... vanished. Even Spain’s prime minister claims not to know where the king has gone, and the royal court in Madrid says it can offer “no information”. He has been reported living in a desert palace in Abu Dhabi and occupying the top floor of a luxury hotel in the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, Spain hums with rumours that the king, who abdicated under pressure six years ago, has not really left at all, but is holed up in a remote retreat in the mountainous province of Galicia.

If no one is certain of the king’s whereabouts, everyone knows the reasons for his disappearance. An unfolding scandal is threatening the future of the monarchy and at the heart of it the exotic figure of Juan Carlos’s former mistress, 56-year-old Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.

For eight years the blonde, German-born socialite shared the king’s gilded life. They traveled abroad together, indulged their taste for ocean sailing, and held regular trysts at the Zarzuela Palace, commonly referred to as the king’s residence, apparently under the nose of the king’s wife, Queen Sofía. Shortly after the affair ended, Corinna received a staggering $107 million ‘pay-off’, and now the king’s countrymen want to know where the money came from.