Engagement of Prince Felipe and Letizia Ortiz: November 1, 2003


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Thanks,
Anna_R & Elsa M.
 
 
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it has been teo years now time flies and they have a baby girl
the princess has grown on me and she has been a hard working princess going on many different trips abroud on royal duty


have your opioion on her change since the engament

i remeber that i was a bit stunned

they were at a event on the night what that event planned before or was it just do to the engement and what was the event
 
Josefine said:
it has been teo years now time flies and they have a baby girl
the princess has grown on me and she has been a hard working princess going on many different trips abroud on royal duty
have your opioion on her change since the engament
Click to expand...

i like her more and more these days.. ever since her engagement, i think, she has proven to be dedicated & sophisticated woman...
a great princess... :) :)
 
Josefine said:
they were at a event on the night what that event planned before or was it just do to the engement and what was the event
Click to expand...
No, Josefine. The night of Letizia's presentation they attended a concert, alon with the rest of the royal family, because it was Queen Sofia's birthday. A happy coincidence!
 
Elsa M thank you so much for the respond on what the event was when they got engaged i actully thout it was a event do to the engagment

what has been said in spain when will The princess be backk at work and will they work as team, take on royal duties togather for a while longer and then Let Letizia work on her own.
 
How they met??

i'm really knew to the spainish royal family but after seeing the prince and princess i think there so in love and its really nice to see. I was wondering how did they met and how long was it till they got engaged??
 
It was kind of sweet, that they found love during a dark time- when she was covering a disaster of a tanker that sank. Here is a paragraph from Letizia's profile on Hello! Magazine.

But it was in November 2002 when she was sent to northern Spain to cover the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige and the subsequent ecological disaster that she fell for the Prince of Asturias. Felipe had journeyed to the coast to offer his support to the beleaguered communities worst affected by the spill. He and Letizia had met once before, a year previously, at a mutual friend's dinner party, but it was against the unlikely backdrop of an environmental catastrophe that they fell in love. They started dating immediately afterwards, but the relationship remained a closely-guarded secret for many months.
Click to expand...
Letizia's Hello! Magazine Profile
 
thanks for that little paragraph, i was wondering is anyone able to get an english site about there love story i dont read spanish or any other language but english
 
I always wonder how they met. Does anyone knows the details or have a time line?

thanks
 
A lot details about Letizia's life and her relationship with Felipe aren't very well known or have been wrongly reported. See, for example, the official biography published by the royal house, which contains several blatant errors. In particular, there is a great confusion about dates.

I'll put here a classic article from El País that is relatively well researched and contains first-hand information from people that knew Letizia at the time of the engagement. Many other reports took their data from this article. It's kind of long and only part of it deals with the way they met, but I thought it could be useful to post it in full, as it also deals with Letizia's family and personality, about which so much talk has been going on. I translated it into broken English and I added some context information between brackets.

I'll post it in several parts as apparently it's too long to fit in one post.

Enjoy! :flowers:


The Engagement of Prince Felipe and Letizia Ortiz ​



Love without barriers​


El País, 09/11/2003

Last Thursday Prince Felipe officially asked Letizia Ortiz’s hand in marriage. It was the formalization of a commitment that took Spaniards by surprise. The future king has decided himself for a professional woman with social and familiar antecedents that until recently would have made the wedding impossible. It is the triumph of love, say the fiancés. This is the history of a romance that has been able to overcome all barriers

The news broke in on Friday, October 31. Everything rushed and Felipe de Borbón, Prince of Asturias, and Letizia Ortiz had to confirm on Saturday November 1 that they were boyfriend and girlfriend, given the rumors that were already circulating in all the press circles of Spain. Actually, they intended to disclose the news at the end of this month. In fact, that weekend they had gone together on a trip outside Spain to plan the announcement.

Fourteen months had passed since they met. It was a surprise for Letizia: that night of September of 2002, the reporter did not hope to meet the Prince of Asturias. Wearing a dark and sober suit, she went to a dinner party held in a penthouse on Alcalá Street, Madrid.

The party was hosted by her colleague of [Spanish public television] TVE, Pedro Erquicia. Among the guests, there were journalists, a cinema director, some businesspeople… and the Prince.

“Letizia and Felipe met at the party. They chatted for a long time and they were incessantly laughing,” comments a witness of the scene. “It was an informal buffet dinner. The Prince didn’t wear a necktie; he was one of least formally dressed of the guests. There were several other young people, but Felipe spoke mainly with her”.

They were laughing because Letizia had just bought a two-bedroom apartment in the district of Valdebernardo [the one to which Erika later moved] and he also had just moved to his own house in the premises of Zarzuela Palace. That is the house where they are going to live together after they marry. The house is 1,700 square meters large and cost to the Spanish treasury 4.237.135 euros, about 705 million pesetas. The main sleeping room alone is 110 square meters, more than the total surface of Letizia’s apartment, and it even has a 35-meter dressing room.

Letizia Ortiz had just returned from the United States, where she had covered the first anniversary of the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That trip was another of the subjects in their conversation. They also chatted on the Prince of Asturias awards, which were going to be awarded the 25 of October. The conversation jumped from Arthur Miller to Daniel Barenboim, and from Woody Allen to Edward Said, some of the recipients of the awards.

Letizia is a passionate of Wagner, Grieg and Tchaikovsky and gets moved when she listens to Mozart’s Requiem. She also likes the music of Dire Straits, Supertramp, U2, Pink Floyd and Joan Manuel Serrat, according to the closest friends of the pair.

They still had many subjects left to speak about at the end of the night. But they said good-bye without planning a future date.

Letizia was sent by TVE to the ceremony of delivery of the awards. And the Prince, like he did every year, visited the studio of the public television to greet the journalists.

Felipe knew Letizia’s professional career. He knew that she had worked at CNN+ and that she later became an anchor of the 7 a.m. news in TVE, for which she also worked as a reporter.

But the Prince did not know her phone number and he did not request it; neither did they exchange their phone numbers during the party organized by Pedro Erquicia.

Letizia Ortiz continued with her meteoric rise in TVE. The assistant director of news services, Pedro Roncal, advised [the director] Alfredo Urdaci to hire her for Canal 24 Horas [TVE nonstop news channel].

Letizia was hired at TVE to work in the 7 a.m. news, but before that, she had to spend a month substituting for one of the anchors of the news program Informe Semanal, which airs on Saturday night.

“Letizia asked me not to leave for vacation without meeting with her for a talk,” says Baltasar Magro, director of the program. “What she wanted from that meeting was my authorization to make journalistic work in Informe Semanal instead ofjust conducting the program. And, indeed, I know that she read the news stories meticulously and the result was fantastic, so much so that I proposed that she should stay in the Informe Semanal team, but the management already had another plan for her”.

The plan consisted in that she would work in the morning news. Again, as she had done at CNN+ before, Letizia Ortiz had to get up very early during a year. Later, she worked as an editor of special news stories while at the same time she presented the news update of 10 a.m.

On April 9, the American army entered Baghdad. Weeks later, when Spanish troops also left for Iraq, TVE decided to send Letizia Ortiz along with the military, on board of the Galicia ship, to Um Qasr, in the south of the country. And it was indeed during that trip when the Prince called her for the first time. A common friend had given him her number.

Little by little, he was learning a lot of things about her that everybody knows by now, for example, that her paternal grandparents were Carmen Álvarez del Valle, a famous radio broadcaster from Asturias, and José Luis Ortiz Velasco, a commercial representative of Olivetti typewriters.

It is impossible to know Letizia without visiting her environment in Asturias. Her teachers at the Gesta I school, in Oviedo, say that she was very participative, very active, smart, talkative and dynamic. She was good at Spanish language and social sciences. When school was over, she used to go to the studios of Oviedo Radio to watch her grandmother work. She had some snacks there as she did her homework. When she was 12 years old she started working at the radio network Antena 3, where she conducted the children’s program El Columpio [The Swing], for which her father helped her to write the scripts.

When Leticia was 15 years old, in 1987, her parents moved to Madrid. They first lived in a suburban house in the community of Rivas-Vaciamadrid, and, together with her two sisters, Letizia enrolled in the middle school Ramiro de Maeztu, where she completed the second year of secondary education. She would attend the same school, choosing the evening classes, for the third year and the university preparation course. She spent the morning at a ballet school. The academic head of the evening classes, Justina Martínez Cebrián, who also taught philosophy, says that they had classes from 6.30 to 10.30 p.m.

Leticia Ortiz chose a combination of classes that was called mixed branch and included subjects of arts and languages, like Latin, and math. “As they lived very far away and at that time the subway did not reach this district yet, the three sisters waited for one another in order to take the public transportation together,” and, according to the teacher, “they would usually get home around midnight”.

She also remembers that Letizia was a hardworking student and that she got a good grade in the exam for university admission.
 
Love without barriers (part 2)​
​
​
Already at Complutense University of Madrid, her classmates have various memories of her. Emma Perez, who now works as journalist at the health services of the community of Castilla-La Mancha, was one of her first friends. “She did not attract attention for being attractive, neither for being too much of a nerd. She was not an outstanding student in any particular subject.”

Isabel Coello, now a correspondent of the news agency EFE in Kenya, was in Letizia’s class during the fourth and fifth years. “At the university you could already see that she was a person who was going to go a long way in the media world. But she was not a climber,” she says. Isabel attended the last year of study at a Paris university, and it was Leticia Ortiz who would pass her the class notes, which Isabel promptly received in France and which allowed her to pass the exams in Madrid. She remembers that Letizia was a kind of nervous young woman and that she dressed smartly for the class. The subject in which Letizia Ortiz would excel the most and she most enjoyed was international relations, according to several of her former classmates.

It was her interest for international relations what led her to travel to Mexico as she was 23 years old in order to attend certain postgraduate courses and to work at the same time for the newspaper Siglo XXI. As she was there, she took the opportunity to advance her knowledge of English at a school. When she returned to Madrid, she continued learning English at a private language school. She has a good knowledge of that language.

As she pursued her studies in journalism, Letizia took some spare time to work as an intern. The first day that Letizia entered a newsroom as an employee was on July 1, 1992. She was 20 years old as she started working for the Asturian newspaper La Nueva España. She spent that summer working in the economic section of the newspaper. She came back a year later for another internship, but this time in the section for local news, culture, society and television. As a student she lived in Madrid, but during those summers she would stay at her maternal grandparents’ house in Oviedo.

It is also important to talk with her maternal grandparents, who are in their eighties and are originally from Madrid, to know the origins of the future queen of Spain. Letizia's grandfather, Francisco Rocasolano Camacho, used to work as a mechanic and taxi driver in Madrid and has been retired for 20 years, living first in Torrevieja and then in Alicante.

“I am from the best district in Madrid,” he says from his home of Alicante, and tells that in Franco’s [civil war] time he was called to fight for the Republic, in the “red zone.” “I am from that Madrid district that no longer exists: Prosperidad, next to the [today upper-class] district of Salamanca,” he proudly insists.

After a while, a woman, Enriqueta Rodriguez, comes to interrupt him: “We are regular, hard-working people without anything special to tell.” And Antonia, the housekeeper, adds: “Enriqueta…! Your name is going to be in the history books that children will read 50 years from now!”

In his early conversations with Letizia, the Prince knew that her father was Jesús Ortiz, a journalist from Asturias who presently works at the company Estudio de Comunicación in Madrid. Before that, he worked for Antena 3 in Oviedo. He also knew that her mother, Paloma Rocasolano, is a paid officer of the SATSE nurses union. Letizia’s parents separated in 1999.

Letizia told him the history of her own name, why it is spelled with a z instead of a c.

At the time she was born in Oviedo, on September 15, 1972, it was required by that the name Maria be put in front of any foreign [female] name. Their parents had to request a permission to [the Catholic authorities in] Rome to be able to name the girl just Leticia. It was during these procedures that she acquired the z of her name. The Italian officer who wrote the authorization document spelt the name with the Italian spelling: Letizia. When the document came to Oviedo, the civil employee of the Civil Registry copied the name as it had been written in Italy. Leticia was registered as Letizia.

Prince Felipe also got to know that Letizia had two sisters, Telma and Erica. The names of the three Ortiz sisters come from literary sources. Letizia was a Latin goddess. Telma is a name from the Greek mythology that means “pleasant.” And Erica comes from German mythology.

Erica and her husband, Antonio Vigo, had graduated in Fine Arts in Madrid, started a company related to their profession in Asturias and, when the project failed, moved to Madrid. Erica has a three-year-old daughter, Carla, Letizia's only niece.

“Letizia adores her niece,” says one of her closest friends. “She will smother her with kisses each time she sees her. Last Thursday, when the journalists asked the Prince how many children they were going to have, he said that more than two and less than five. And I am sure she is delighted with that, because she really adores children.”

Throughout his relation with Letizia, the Prince had the opportunity to meet Telma, Letizia’s unmarried sister, who studied economics and now works in Jerusalem with the NGO Doctors Without Borders.

Little by little, the Prince learnt that she knew how to enjoy wine, that she was interested in gastronomy, and that, in spite of being so thin, Letizia did not hold back from eating anything. He also knew that she did not go to the gym several times a week, as has been said, but she used to go swimming at a swimming pool in the district of Moratalaz.

His tastes, preferences and pastimes were already public: he likes watching movies, always in original version [not dubbed in Spanish]. He mainly prefers to read history and non-fiction books, but he also likes Shakespeare and some 18th-century metaphysical poet or other. He enjoys Latin music, although Letizia doesn’t. And he has practiced several sports.

They share a passion for the countryside. She loves the landscape of Asturias and hiking around the small villages of her grandparents, and he is crazy about animals. He even presented a documentary series on the Iberian fauna in TVE.

And what do the King and Queen think of Letizia Ortiz? “The Prince always had his parents’ support,” says a member of Letizia’s closest circle of friends.
 
Love without barriers (part 3)​

When Prince Felipe and Letizia Ortiz met, both knew very well how to distinguish between rumor and news. So they tried their best to keep hiding it [their relationship]. Even the few people who knew the secret used nicknames to talk about the couple.​

Letizia didn’t tell anything to anybody in her network, even to any of her co-workers or any of her supervisors. But one night last June a co-worker saw her sitting with some girlfriends in a centric restaurant of Madrid. The Prince arrived to the town from a trip outside Spain and wanted to see her that same day. He came to the restaurant by himself and sat next to her. Since then, the rumor began to circulate quietly around the corridors of TVE. However, Letizia Ortiz denied it.​

Her friend and former boss in CNN+, Lino Ventosinos, an evening editor at the network, took out his cell phone on Friday, October 31, when the rumor had already reached the corridors of Sogecable [CNN+ mother company]. From his phonebook list, he dialed the name “Leti” and said jokingly: “Come on, Leti, we must decide what we are going to wear for the [wedding] reception.” She answered to him: “Don’t believe what the press of the heart says.” He did not want to force things.​

In fact, it was not the press of the heart that spread the rumor. That Friday in the morning, the journalist of the SER radio network Rafael Manzano, the Owl, had given a hint in the morning program Hoy por hoy. Two months before, the veteran reporter Tico Medina also had announced that people were talking about the relationship of the Prince with a journalist.​

But it was that comment in Rafael Manzano’s section at the SER radio broadcast what made the pair decide to take the step that rushed everything. Therefore, Letizia spoke right away with its boss, the news director of TVE, Alfredo Urdaci. “When Urdaci decided several months back that she would be one of the anchors [together with him] of the second edition of the Telediario, he could never have imagined anything about the relationship of Letizia with the Prince,” say people close to her.​

The fiancée of the Prince joined the Academy of Television, the organ to which all the professionals of the sector belong, only six weeks ago, on the 29 of September. The fact that Letizia Ortiz has a commitment to present the ceremony of the Talento Prizes, that the Academy will award next 21 of November, proves that she was still thinking she would continue working in her profession.​

Two reporters, one of them a photographer, recommended her for membership, and she was admitted as member number 783. Neither one of the two knew anything about the relationship of Letizia with the Prince.​

In fact, neither she herself knew very well what her future was going to be until very few months ago. After returning from Iraq, when the dates with the Prince were more and more frequent, Letizia went on vacation to Costa Rica in July. The first thing she threw in the suitcase was a sort of notebook in which she would write her thoughts down. She needed to clarify her doubts.​

In Costa Rica she met some Spanish journalist friends who worked there. She spent a couple of days with them and later she traveled by herself to the forest area. When she returned she went to spend one week at the beach in Tarragona.​

She had clearer ideas by then. Later she would travel with the Prince in the boat of one of his friends. They sailed together on the Mediterranean. They used to see each other in public places surrounded by friends or in the houses of other friends.​

By then, the relation that Letizia had maintained with the CNN+ journalist David Tejera, whom she met in 1999, was absolutely over, according to several people from the close entourage of the Prince’s fiancée.​

“It is nonsense demanding that a 31-year-old woman does not have a past,” says one of her friends of CNN+, that, like all her old friends, have been harassed by the press.​

For example, Almendralejo, Badajoz, will be an important part of the album of memories of the future queen of Spain. “Letizia has won the lottery, and Alonso Guerrero, a refund” is a comment often heard on the streets of this frontier town of 25,000 inhabitants. ​

That is the place where Letizia spent days having drinks at the Guaracha, eating tapas on the old town streets and sleeping at 4 Palomas Street, the home of her first in-laws; at the restaurant Paraíso she celebrated nothing less than the nuptial banquet, and in the palace of Monsalud, seat of the City council, she married Alonso Guerrero (Mérida, 1962) after seven years of being his girlfriend.​

Letizia has a personal past. But also professional one. In 1998, Letizia Ortiz worked for EFE Television as a news anchor for the Bloomber[g] channel, specialized in economic questions.​

Francisco Basterra, director of CNN+, hired her when the cable channel was at its beginning. “She passed a series of selection tests in which more than one hundred people participated,” Basterra pointed out. “In the personal interview she had with me she gave me the impression of being very self-confident and having an enormous desire for success.”​

Basterra emphasizes the self-confidence of Letizia Ortiz. “She was very good at negotiating her contract. She told me she was really good and she was going to demonstrate that. And she got a contract worth half a million [pesetas] more than the average contract of the people that were hired”.​
 
Love without barriers (part 4)​

Letizia Ortiz had to rise from bed at 2.30 a.m. At 4 a.m. she used to reach the CNN+ headquarters in downtown Madrid.​

Those days she had to juggle the problems of her divorce and a schedule that had taken her to the limit of her forces. All her co-workers emphasize how thin Letizia was. “Once when I was greeting her I got to touch her back and there were only bones. I told her: dear, you have to take care of yourself, you must eat,” says Rafael Lechner, a former colleague of her at the network.​

“But Letizia always fulfilled her duties. She was a television animal. She controlled all the details: the lighting, the make-up, the clothes, the hairstyles, the texts, everything,” remembers the assistant director of news services of the network, Victoria Lafora.​

The same says about her a male hairstylist of the network with whom she got to spend many dawn hours. “She was conscious that she had to look perfect on screen. In fact, in all the images of her that have been recovered she looks perfect. When she came she already knew how to style her hair. She was self-sufficient and she could do everything all by her self without problem.” She didn’t add any product to her hair: “She is a natural blonde. Only from time to time she would have some highlights done”.​

“She was in a hurry to get where she was going. And I think it is all right if a 27-year-old girl wants to eat the world,” indicates a CNN+ manager. “When she had the opportunity get on the air for ten minutes in the free-broadcast news program that we have at Canal+ on weekends, she took advantage of it. It did not matter to her if she had to work two or three hours more for the same salary. Let us say that if in a newsroom there are a 90% of people that does not like to compete, she belongs to the remaining 10%,” affirms that source.​

“She is a very nervous girl and she wanted everything done right away,” comments a cameraman that worked with her. “She wanted me to capture with the camera precisely what she saw with her eyes at a given moment. If it were for her, she would have taken the camera and would have recorded the images herself. It was for that reason that some people could not work with her, because she wanted to control everything, up to the smallest detail”.​

She entered CNN+ in December 1998. The following year she married in a civil ceremony Alonso Guerrero, a literature teacher at the public middle school Ramiro de Maeztu in Madrid, though he had not been a teacher of Letizia Ortiz, as has been affirmed in several media.​

In a 56-page book entitled El hombre abreviado [The abbreviated man], published a year before they separated, there is a brief biographical sketch of Letizia’s ex-husband [who was the author of that novel]: “Graduated in Philosophy and Letters by the University of Extremadura, he became a novelist when he was eight years old (...). In his spare time he teaches literature at a middle school of Madrid”.​

It has been said of Letizia Ortiz that she is a compulsive reader. Among her preferred readings, with which “the future princess of Asturias has grown on the inside,” one can mention Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke or Labyrinth of solitude by Octavio Paz. Also mystical poets like saint Juan de la Cruz, of whom she treasures The living flame of love, or world classics like Tender is the night by Scott Fitzgerald, The Woman in White byWilkie Collins; Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth. She always reads with a pen in hand. She likes to underline, to gloss, to stress, to analyze. From now on a new chapter begins in the life of Letizia, the life of prince Felipe and the history of Spain.​

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reportajes/Amor/barreras/elpdomrpj/20031109elpdmgrep_1/Tes​
 
Thank you very much Duncan. It's nice to read this article in those "sad days", it makes us come back several years ago.
I've read many things about how they met but I think nobody knows what happened, when they decided to be closed and so and so .
I remember I've read they met each other during this dinner and later in the ceremony of "Prince's Award" she didn't want to be near the Prince in the foto (Maybe they were already "good friends"). She met him again in Galicia during the boat's catastroph.
So each jornalist has his own story, his oxn "source" and we can't know exactly how they met, if it was a "coup de foudre" or not......
The result is splendid : a nice couple with a nice little girl and an other nearly. A very good couple in their job too.....
 
I love the article.. it's nice that we have a bit of information about how they met and Letizia's life before she became Princess of Asturias.. she's really a very talented, smart woman..
 
Thank you so much Duncan for a very interesting article. I had no idea Letizia had worked for CNN International. Not to insult Eva Sannum, but Felipe and Letizia are truly soul mates and I don't doubt their deep love for one another.:flowers:
 
Not CNN International but the Spanish channel CNN+, a joint effort between TBS Networks and the Spanish company Sogecable.

Sogecable, that also comprises the TV channels Canal+, mentioned in the article, and Cuatro, belongs to the powerful media group Prisa, that also owns, among other, the newspaper El País, where this article was published.
 
As I'm Letizia observator since the begining, id est since the famous announce of the Royal House, I knew this article yet.

It seems to be the more near of the the truth even if, as its normal in this kind of story, it's difficult to share the reality with the phantsamatic thaughts of journalist. In any way it's a fantastic story, love story, story of lovers of their country!
 
wow thank you soooo much duncan, it was a good read. I'm so glad there married they really do look so in love with each other. I hope one day there maybe a book about there love i would really like to read that.
 
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