Spain’s former king is grieving a friend who, for decades, gave him something in short supply for a man in his position: somewhere to disappear. Juan Carlos, now 88, is mourning Alfonso Fanjul, the Cuban-American businessman known to friends as “Alfy,” who died on Monday 3 August at the age of 89.
The two men were close for many years. Fanjul ran the Central Romana Corporation, which grew into the Dominican Republic’s largest sugar producer and a sprawling business spanning agriculture, industry and tourism. He is widely credited with helping turn the country into a sought-after destination, and his luxury resort, Casa de Campo in La Romana, became the former king’s favourite bolt-hole. There, far from the scrutiny he faced at home, Juan Carlos could sail, play golf and walk the beach in near-total privacy.
That privacy was the point. The Fanjul family prized discretion, and it was precisely that quiet that made their hotel such a refuge for the king. After he abdicated in 2014, handing the throne to his son Felipe, he continued to spend time in La Romana, slipping away from public life for stretches in the Caribbean sun.
The connection ran deep enough that when Juan Carlos left Spain in 2020 amid mounting scandal, the Dominican Republic was widely tipped as his likely place of exile, with Casa de Campo repeatedly named in the Spanish and international press. In the end he settled elsewhere, moving to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where he has now lived for around six years. His wife, Queen Sofia, 87, remained in Spain.
Alfy was not the only member of the influential family close to the monarch. His younger brother, Jose “Pepe” Fanjul, 82, is among Juan Carlos’s most loyal companions, and the brothers’ shared instinct for keeping things out of the spotlight was a large part of their appeal to a man who has spent recent years trying to stay out of it himself.
Fanjul’s own story was one of reinvention. Born in Havana in 1937, a year before Juan Carlos, he left Cuba with his family after the revolution of the 1950s. From the United States the Fanjuls built one of the largest sugar empires in the world, later branching into tourism, real estate and infrastructure. With his death, the Caribbean loses one of its most prominent business figures.
For Juan Carlos, the loss is a private one rather than a matter of state. Fanjul was never a fixture of official royal life, just a friend, one of the small circle who gave the former king a place to be ordinary. Those long, unbothered days at Casa de Campo are, in the end, what he is left holding.
