Queen Letizia – Her life as a Princess and Queen has been full of challenges. Honest, perfectionist, and hardworking. That’s the Queen. With high self-esteem and a strong personality, she never gives up or lets her guard down. And although her role is to accompany the King, she becomes increasingly committed, as their shared goal is to continue rewriting a new model for the Monarchy with him. That is her mission: to leave a positive legacy and hand over the crown to her daughter with Spain in the best possible condition.
Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano was born on September 15, 1972, in Oviedo, and baptized on September 29, 1972, in the parish of San Francisco in the Asturian capital. The granddaughter and daughter of journalists (her father, Jesús Ortiz, was the founder of Antena 3 Radio in Asturias and its director until 1987), she graduated in Information Sciences, with a focus on Journalism, from the Complutense University of Madrid. She completed a Master’s degree in Audiovisual Journalism at the Institute for Audiovisual Journalism Studies and began her doctoral studies in Mexico, where she worked for the newspaper Siglo 21.
Her stage as a journalist
She has worked from a young age in various media outlets, including the Asturian newspaper La Nueva España, the newspaper ABC, and the EFE Agency, where she worked in the international edition during her final year of university. In television, she has worked for the American network Bloomberg TV, a private channel specializing in economics, finance, and markets, based in Spain under the supervision of the EFE Television Agency. She has also been a presenter, editor, and reporter for CNN+, the private channel formed by the American CNN and CANAL+.
Letizia Ortiz joined Televisión Española in 2000, where she hosted Informe Semanal. She later presented Telediario Matinal, the Euro specials featured on TVE’s news programs, and was a special correspondent around the world to cover the most current events. In her later years as a journalist, she covered events such as 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Prestige disaster, and she also hosted the second edition of TVE’s news program.
Her much-discussed greeting with Prince Philip
Her last special coverage as a journalist was the Prince of Asturias Awards ceremony, where she was seen in public alongside Don Felipe de Borbón. That day, after the evening newscast on Televisión Española broadcast from Oviedo, presented by Letizia Ortiz and Alfredo Urdaci, Don Felipe went to the lounge at the Hotel de la Reconquista, where the news editorial staff of the public network worked, and there he greeted the TVE staff. The cameras of Televisión Española captured the greeting between Don Felipe and Doña Letizia, who, according to witnesses present, had shining eyes as they shook hands.
Letizia Ortiz is highly regarded by her colleagues and has left her mark on every media outlet she has worked for. Sensitive, smart, responsible, and extremely personable are some of the adjectives attributed to her.
Letizia Ortiz was married for a year to Alfonso Guerrero, a language teacher at the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute in Madrid, where she had studied, and she divorced him before completing a year of marriage.
Her first meeting with Don Felipe
Prince Felipe and Letizia Ortiz met on October 17, 2002, at a dinner hosted by Pedro Erquicia, presenter and director of Documentos TV, at his Madrid penthouse. They say it was love at first sight and that the Prince fell in love with the journalist, whom he met months later at the Prince of Asturias Awards ceremony and in Galicia, while she was covering the Prestige disaster.
Engagement Announcement
After a summer, during which it is rumored they spent a few peaceful days together on the yacht of a friend of the Prince, the courtship continued until November 1, 2003, when Zarzuela announced the official engagement of Don Felipe and Doña Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano. Five days later, the proposal was made, and two weeks later, the Royal Household announced the exact date of the wedding: May 22, 2004. A day that will go down in Spanish history, on which Doña Letizia became the wife of the Prince of Asturias.
The arrival of Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía
Almost a year after their wedding, on May 8, 2005, they announced that they were expecting their first child. Fate would have it that on October 31—almost exactly two years after they announced their engagement to all Spaniards—the birth of their firstborn daughter, whom they named Leonor de Todos los Santos de Borbón y Ortiz, the future heir to the Spanish throne. Leonor, who became the seventh grandchild of the King and Queen, received the sacrament of baptism on January 14, 2006, at Zarzuela Palace. Her godparents were Juan Carlos and Sofía, then King and Queen of Spain.
Just eight months later, when little Leonor had already become the “doll” of the Palace, the Royal Household announced that the Prince and Princess of Asturias were expecting their second child. Breaking with the tradition that had never revealed the sex of the baby, Don Felipe and Doña Letizia announced that it would be a girl. The King and Queen’s eighth grandchild came into the world by Caesarean section on the afternoon of April 29, 2007, and was baptized Sofía de Todos los Santos on July 15, 2007. Unlike her sister, Leonor, Infanta Sofía’s godparents were the mother of the former Princess of Asturias, Paloma Rocasolano, and Prince Constantine of Bulgaria, a close friend of Prince Felipe.
Abdication of King Juan Carlos
During these years prior to the announcement of the abdication of King Juan Carlos on June 2, 2014, Doña Letizia assumed the role of Princess of Asturias with distinction, fulfilling both her official commitments alone and alongside Don Felipe, with whom she prepared for the day when she would take the reins of the kingdom, assuming her role as Queen of Spain.
The first sovereign without royal blood in the history of the Spanish Monarchy is a different kind of Queen, one who has reinvented herself many times through prodigious discipline. She gave up her promising career as a journalist for love, and before embracing a new profession serving all Spaniards, she trained and educated herself to perform her role as Queen with distinction.
How many languages does the Queen speak?
During her learning and training period, Letizia did not neglect her language skills. When she arrived at the palace, her English was not fluent. She spoke, understood, and wrote it like many Spanish university students of her generation, but it was far from the level required to function naturally in the position she was about to achieve, and she worked hard to perfect it. It’s not her only language; we’ve also seen her speaking in Catalan, Valencian, French, Portuguese, and German.
Queen Letizia and fashion
Queen Letizia practices the four Rs of sustainable and ethical fashion: reuse, recycle, recover, and reduce. She also embraces the Spanish low-cost trend without hesitation, masters the formal dress style, and almost always makes a splash with her outfits.
The Queen’s Back
She also maintains a very healthy lifestyle and, in addition to taking care of her diet, exercises a lot. According to some sources, she has a personal trainer and exercises two hours a day, alternating between yoga and Pilates classes, as well as cycling. She works on her biceps with dumbbells, wall dips, triceps extension machines, planks, and push-ups to work her core. She also runs, boxes, climbs, and dances Zumba, which is why the shape of her arms and her toned back have been discussed so often.
Personality
She retains her overwhelming personality, her perfectionism, her drive to work, her journalistic flair, and her desire to prove that everything can be done differently. Her style is that of a feminist Queen who is where she wants to be, passionate about life and her daughters. She is a pillar of the King’s shared project: commitment, exemplary conduct, impeccable conduct, hard work and usefulness, solidarity, and an ethical worldview… And she doesn’t regret having left behind the formal “you” to become Her Majesty.
