"For the Ortiz family, Oviedo had become the gossipy, envious, and classist Vetusta that Clarín had created for Ana Ozores. In reality, all of Spain had become Vetusta."

Valdebernardo neighborhood, Madrid; year 2003. The doorman of an ordinary building tells the manager of the pastry shop where he has breakfast every day that lately there have been men in black in the hallways of his building and cars with tinted windows waiting outside.

Royal Theatre, weeks later. Felipe de Borbón and Letizia Ortiz have just announced their engagement and are attending a concert by Mstislav Rostropovich. Several members of Madrid's aristocracy are asked to leave their usual seats due to the unexpected presence of the prince and his fiancée. During the intermission, several small groups form, but there is only one topic of conversation.

These two scenes perfectly reflect how Letizia's arrival into the royal family and her introduction to Spanish society unfolded twenty years ago. The journalist became an intruder, a threat, an uncomfortable presence viewed with suspicion by the more orthodox circles of the royal family. Simply for being a woman, divorced, and a "commoner," she had to endure the severe scrutiny of the media, the witty remarks of pundits, the outright rejection of the aristocracy, and the outrage of the most conservative Catholics.

With the privileged perspective of someone who knows a country from both inside and outside, Martín Bianchi Tasso reconstructs the impact that the arrival of a modern middle-class professional had on all levels of society—the press and television, the nobility, royalty, politics, the church, and the people—in one of the most archaic institutions in our country.

Martín Bianchi Tasso (Buenos Aires, 1983) is a journalist. He currently writes for El País and is a contributor to Hoy por hoy on Cadena SER radio. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of ¡Hola! magazine, head of the Society section at Vanity Fair, and section head at ABC, where he coordinated the "People and Style" supplement. Throughout his career, he has interviewed numerous members of royalty and the international jet set. He is the author of Baby and Crista, the Daughters of Alfonso XIII (2023).