These days a series of public events are being held throughout Spain for the first ten years of the reign of Felipe VI. It is no wonder, if we remember that our constitutional regime is that of a parliamentary monarchy, with a Head of State, the King, who is guardian of the Law of Laws, of the Constitution.
I have been able to participate in several of these celebrations, and notably in the one we had last Wednesday, June 26, at the Institute of Spain (IdeE). The political holding that brings together the ten main royal academies of Spain, the oldest, the RAE (1713), and the most recent, the Economic and Financial Sciences, the only one based outside Madrid, in Barcelona.
At the IdeE, Andrés Ollero acted as academic coordinator of the ten aforementioned Doctas Casas – in the presence of the Secretary General of the Royal House, Domingo Martínez Palomo – to pay tribute to the King in a session with two presentations. One by academic Hernán Cortés, referring to the eight portraits that he himself has painted of the King. The second presentation was entrusted to me on “The King also knows about Astronomy”: the possibility of a future encounter of new inhabited worlds in interstellar space, with the analogies of 1492.
It was a good session of the IdeE, full of affection for Felipe VI, and the celebration was extended with the program “La verdad desnuda” (The Naked Truth) – hosted by Ramiro Aurín on Capital Radio – in which there was a splendid greeting from the radio “in the velvet voice” of Luis del Olmo. And a lesson in constitutional law offered by Professor Jesús Sánchez Lambás, on the parliamentary monarchy.
Congratulations Don Felipe, and may you continue to have many more years.