Felipe VI of Spain
Felipe VI has been King of Spain since June 2014, acceding when his father Juan Carlos I abdicated amid scandal, and his reign has been an exercise in salvaging the monarchy's standing. Born in Madrid in 1968, he was educated in Spain, at Lakefield College in Canada, and took a degree in law and economics at the Autónoma before a master's in international relations at Georgetown. He trained at all three military academies and qualified as a helicopter pilot. He was a competitive sailor, representing Spain at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. He married Letizia Ortiz, a television news presenter and a divorcee from a middle-class Asturian family, in 2004 — a break with royal marriage convention that was popular. They have two daughters, and Leonor is heir under a constitution that still gives preference to male heirs, though no younger brother exists. He acceded after his father's reputation collapsed over an elephant-hunting trip to Botswana in 2012 during the financial crisis and the corruption conviction of his brother-in-law Iñaki Urdangarin. His defining moment came on 3 October 2017, days after the Catalan independence referendum, when he made a televised address condemning the regional government for placing itself outside the law. It was decisive, constitutionally orthodox and deeply polarising, and it ended any pretence of the crown standing above politics in Catalonia. In 2020 he renounced his personal inheritance from his father and withdrew Juan Carlos's allowance after disclosures about offshore accounts and a hundred-million-dollar payment from Saudi Arabia; Juan Carlos moved to Abu Dhabi. Felipe published the royal household's accounts and his own assets, and visited Valencia after the 2024 floods, where crowds threw mud at him.
- Lived: 1968 CE – ?
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: king, head_of_state
