On July 23, 2004, Carmen died in her home in Madrid. Eight years later, on August 2, 2012, Belén, her beloved sister, followed her. The Ordóñez sisters were two women who did no harm to anyone except themselves. Fun, party-loving, love-struck, and with a walk through the dark world that did not save them.
They were born into a family with a bullfighting family tree from head to toe. A saga where that world was mixed with the social and intellectual. On the one hand, the Dominguíns through the maternal branch and, on the other, the Ordóñez. The mother, whom everyone called Carmina, was Luis Miguel’s sister. The Recreo de San Cayetano, in Ronda, which is currently owned by the brothers Francisco and Cayetano, was open to the public, just like the Valcargado estate in Medina Sidonia and the houses in Seville and Madrid. Belencita, Belén’s daughter, sold part of the Recreo to her cousins. She never wanted a public profile and little or nothing is known about her. In that field the girls enjoyed a life in cotton with their cousins Miguel, Lucia and Paola Dominguín Bosé. It was an extended family where men ruled and tenderness and education were the responsibility of the mother, Carmina. A woman of natural elegance, good, and the compass for her daughters, she lost her way when she died of cancer in 1982. That year, the countdown began for the Ordóñez girls who lost a mother who was the point of union of the family. Nothing was the same, as they themselves said when they spoke of what her presence had meant in their lives. “Without her, everything went adrift,” Belén said in her memoirs. It should be noted that Carmen Ordóñez was never Carmina. That was the mother’s name. She was Carmuca when she was little and Carmen until her death, as her lifelong friends, Charo Vega, the Lapiques and Lolita Flores, always called her.
Both married very young. They left the tutelage of a strict father who was vigilant about the female honour of the Ordóñez family, believing that marriage was a liberation. And it was more of the same with husbands who were very clear about the role of their wives. And not precisely that of coming and going from home without their control. Although they had disagreements, they could not live without each other. Carmen was the pretty one and Belén the attractive one. Carmen drank life and so did Belén. The eldest was unlucky in love and neither was the youngest. Some of their partners did not treat them well and they managed to separate before the inevitable happened. Antonio Ordóñez died in 1988 without imagining the tragedies that his two loves would experience. Addictions, abuse, toxic relationships and friendships that were not toxic and took advantage of the generosity of the Ordóñez Dominguín sisters. Above all, Carmen, who spent what she earned on a “Tómbola” type program on never-ending parties.
Princess life
By birth they lived the lives of princesses. Two teenagers who travelled with their parents to New York, Paris, Rome or any destination that was not common in those 60s and 70s. Summers in Marbella, the April Fair in a horse-drawn carriage with Father Ordóñez proud of his girls and exchanges in Switzerland. They studied at the French Lyceum, the same school that their cousins Dominguín and the Koplowitzes attended. They were thirteen months apart and were always together, although they had a disagreement over their father’s inheritance that did not last long.
Ordóñez, who was aware of his daughters’ limited ability to maintain their finances in good shape, left the inheritance to the grandchildren and the legitimate one to them. To Carmen, one hundred and twenty million pesetas and to Belén, a flat near La Maestranza and a shop. The eldest daughter considered that the youngest had been better off. Except for that clash, they could not live without each other. They shared a bedroom, until their first separation when Carmen married “Paquirri” at 17 years old. Belén, at 18, with another bullfighter, Beca Belmonte. They separated the same year and repeated unsuccessful relationships as happy as their existence.