A set of ugly royals - Rambling About

The Spanish royal family has a very clearly defined constitutional position, and part of that is that all the stuff they accumulated over the centuries is now owned by the Spanish State. The royals get to use stuff in ceremonies, but they don’t own it. Lots of said stuff is now housed in a new museum – the Galaria de las Coleciones Reales.

It’s a great little museum which we found fascinating, more because it gave a good insight into Spanish history than for the pieces on display. I hadn’t even realized that there was a point when the Spanish ruled over a quarter of the World’s population. And their cousins, thanks to continual intermarriage, controlled much of the rest.

We did conclude that historically they may have been fabulously rich and powerful but they were also fantastically ugly. Given that most of the portraits were showing ‘their best side’ it was slightly frightening. Charles II was said by his contemporaries to be ‘so ugly as to cause fear’. But then he didn’t have any children and the Spanish got to swap out the gene-pool.

After the museum we had a wander around the centre of Madrid. I was interested to see that the street sellers had upped their game since last we noticed them and added in a quick bundling-up-and-running-away mechanism to their display.