Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano (; born 15 September 1972) is Queen of Spain as the wife of King Felipe VI.
Letizia came from a middle-class family. She worked as a journalist for ABC and EFE before becoming a news anchor at CNN+ and Televisión Española. In 1998, she married Alonso Guerrero Pérez, whom she divorced the following year. In 2004, Letizia married Felipe, then Prince of Asturias as the son and heir apparent of King Juan Carlos I. The couple has two daughters, Leonor and Sofía. As Princess of Asturias, Letizia represented her father-in-law in Spain and abroad. On Juan Carlos's abdication in June 2014, Felipe became king, making Letizia queen consort.
As the consort of the ruling monarch, Letizia has no constitutional functions of her own and it is constitutionally prohibited to do so, unless she assume the role of regent. In this sense, the queen performs public commitments representing the Crown, often with her husband, but she is focused on being the patron, president or member of numerous charities and organizations, and she is the visible face of the Spanish international cooperation, often traveling around the world supervising and promoting it.
Family
Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano was born on 15 September 1972 at Miñor Sanatorium in Oviedo, Asturias, the eldest daughter of Jesús José Ortiz Álvarez, a journalist, and his first wife, María de la Paloma Rocasolano Rodríguez, a registered nurse and hospital union representative. She has two younger sisters, Telma (b. 1973) and Érika (1975–2007). Érika committed suicide by an intentional drug overdose while Letizia was pregnant with her second child.
Ortiz's parents divorced in 1999 and her father remarried in Madrid on 18 March 2004 to fellow journalist Ana Togores.
Ortiz's paternal grandparents were José Luis Ortiz Velasco (ca. 1923–2005), a commercial employee at Olivetti; and María del Carmen "Menchu" Álvarez del Valle (1928–2021), a radio broadcaster in Asturias for over 40 years. Her maternal grandfather was Francisco Julio Rocasolano Camacho (1918–2015), a mechanic and cab driver in Madrid for over 20 years who was of French and Occitan origin. Letizia's maternal grandmother, Enriqueta Rodriguez Figueredo (1919–2008) was born in the Philippines to Filipino and Spanish parents.
British genealogists have provided evidence that through her mother's Rocasolano lineage, Ortiz descends from Astorg Roquesoulane (died c.1564), and her coat of arms incorporates the arms of the Rocasolano family. Reports have suggested – and remain unproven – that on her paternal grandfather's side, she is a descendant of an untitled family descended from medieval nobility who served as constables of Castile.
Education and career
Ortiz attended La Gesta School in Oviedo, before her family moved to Rivas-Vaciamadrid near Madrid, where she attended the Ramiro de Maeztu High School. She completed a bachelor's degree in journalism, at the Complutense University of Madrid, as well as a master's degree in audiovisual journalism at the Institute for Studies in Audiovisual Journalism.
During her studies, Ortiz worked for the Asturian daily newspaper La Nueva España and later for the newspaper ABC and the national news agency EFE. After completing her master's degree, she travelled to Guadalajara, Mexico, where she worked at the newspaper Siglo 21 and began work toward a PhD. She did not, however, complete her doctoral thesis because she returned to Spain. After returning to Spain, she worked for the Spanish version of the economic channel Bloomberg before moving to the news network CNN+.
In 2000, Ortiz moved to TVE, where she started working for the news channel 24 Horas. In 2002, she anchored the weekly news report programme Informe Semanal and later the daily morning news programme Telediario Matinal on TVE 1. In August 2003, a few months before her engagement to Felipe, Prince of Asturias, Ortiz was promoted to anchor of the TVE daily evening news programme Telediario 2, the most viewed newscast in Spain. In 2000, she reported from Washington, D.C., on the presidential elections. In September 2001, she broadcast live from Ground Zero following the 9/11 attacks in New York and in 2003, she filed reports from Iraq following the war. In 2002 she sent several reports from Galicia in northern Spain following the ecological disaster when the oil tanker Prestige sank.
First marriage
Ortiz married Alonso Guerrero Pérez (born in 1962), a writer and a high school literature teacher, on 7 August 1998, in a simple civil ceremony at Almendralejo, in Badajoz, after a 10-year courtship. The marriage was dissolved by divorce in 1999.