A GAME OF THRONES

Juan Carlos I of Spain was once the model of a modern European constitutional monarch. Then came the fall. A tale of fathers, sons, mistresses, and money.

- JOSHUA HAMMER

The Royal Club Náutico, in the resort of Sanxenxo, a curving strip of white sand beach on Spain's Galician coast, is a major stop on the international sailboat racing circuit. But the hundreds of journalists who mobbed the port on May 20 hadn't come to admire the yachts competing in the 2022 Spanish Cup. The object of their attention was an octogenarian sailor sporting salmon-colored chinos and a pink baseball cap: Spain's former king, Juan Carlos I. Having abdicated the throne in 2014, then gone into exile under pressure from his son, King Felipe VI, in 2020, he had chosen this moment for his first trip home from his current residence, an islet off the coast of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.

The Casa Real, as the Spanish royal house is known, hadn't wanted Juan Carlos to come home at all. "He's seen as a burden," says José María Irujo, an investigative reporter for El País, Spain's largest newspaper, who exposed a series of suspicious gifts to Juan Carlos from billionaire benefactors that were funneled over the years into secret bank accounts, including one belonging to his socialite mistress. An investigation into his finances by Swiss prosecutors, launched in 2018, ended in December 2021 with no charges filed. Three months later Spanish prosecutors dropped their own probe, citing "a lack of incriminating evidence, the statute of limitations, [and] the inviolability of the head of state."