. King Felipe VI, in San Telmo, back home
All the family branches of the Monarch connect with the habitual residence of their ancestors
King Felipe VI visits the ancestral home of a good part of his closest family, where many of his ancestors spent long years of life and misfortunes, today converted into the seat of the Government of the Junta de Andalucía.
The Palace of San Telmo was ordered to be built by
Antonio de Orleans, Duke of Montpensier and son of King Luis Felipe I of France, who was dethroned in the revolts of 1848.
Married to María Luisa Fernanda de Borbón, th
e youngest daughter of Fernando VII and María Cristina, younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, the Dukes of Montpensier fled first to Brussels, while their properties in Paris were looted, and they landed in Seville in 1850, where thanks to the rich inheritance of his wife they acquired the old School of Pilots. and Mareantes to build the Palace of San Telmo as well as some 40 hectares of surrounding forest that they soon transformed into its gardens, providing it with sidewalks, ponds, pavilions and gazebos, and also various lands in Sanlúcar de Barrameda and in the town of Villamanrique de la Condesa.
The Duke died in 1890 and shortly after, in 1893, Luisa Fernanda donated these gardens to the city. Four years later, upon her death in 1897, Luisa Fernanda bequeathed the San Telmo Palace to the Archbishopric of Seville. The gardens were finally inaugurated as a public park of the city in 1914 with the name of Parque de María Luisa.
In that period, the marriage
was born nine children, the fifth of them was the famous María de las Mercedes de las coplas, born in 1860 in the Royal Palace of Madrid,
who married King Alfonso XII very young and died just two days after turning 18. But it is not the figure of Alfonso XII through this brief marriage with the daughter of the Orléans that links King Felipe VI more directly with San Telmo.
One of the sisters of this María de las Mercedes, who "dressed in a white mantilla looked like a tea rose", according to the version of Quintero, León and Quiroga, was
María Isabel, born in 1848 in the Reales Alcázares of Seville and who had time to long inhabit said Palace with his parents and siblings until his donation to the city and the archbishopric.
This
María Isabel Orleans y Borbón, granddaughter therefore of King Louis Philippe of France and also of Ferdinand VII,
married a cousin of his, Philippe of Orleans, count of Paris, son of a brother of the Duke of Montpensier, with whom he had eight children and he died in 1919 in Villamanrique de la Condesa.
The seventh of these children was the Infanta Luisa of Orléans and Orléans, born in Cannes in 1882, although she soon moved to Seville, where she still had time to sleep and inhabit the apartments of San Telmo, although her most habitual abode, still being As a girl, it was already the rural palace of Villamanrique, where they moved even before the death of their grandmother, Luisa Fernanda, the donor of the gardens and the Palace of San Telmo.
This Louise of Orléans and Orléans remarried with a branch of the Bourbons by marriage, by remarrying for him with Carlos Tancredo de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, nephew of the last King of the Two Sicilies, Francisco II. Carlos Tancredo had been married first to another María de las Mercedes, the eldest daughter between King Alfonso XII and the aforementioned queen consort María Cristina of Austria, regent and mother in turn of King Alfonso XIII, born at the death of his father, Alfonso XII. From that first marriage,
three children were born Bourbon-Two Sicilies and Bourbon.
From the second marriage between Carlos de Borbón-Dos Sicilias and Luisa de Orléans, four children were born, among them, María de las Mercedes and Esperanza de Borbón-Dos Sicilias y Orléans. The first of them married
Don Juan de Borbón, son of Alfonso XIII, father of King Don Juan Carlos and grandfather of Felipe VI.
For her part, Doña Esperanza, married to Don Pedro Gastón de Orléans-Braganza, pretender to the throne of Brazil and Portugal, always remained closely linked to the traditions and the Rociero landscape from their residence already mentioned in Villamanrique de la Condesa that they acquired in their day the Dukes of Montpensier at the same time as the Palace of San Telmo.
Don Carlos de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, Don Juan Carlos's maternal grandfather, was frequented as a child by the future Juan Carlos I at his home in Seville when he was studying in Madrid after the first agreement reached between Don Juan and Francisco Franco so that he was educated in Spain throughout 1948 and 1949.
Don Carlos Tancredo, who had been Captain General of the IV Military Region based in Seville before exile during the Second Republic and who returned to the Andalusian capital to settle here permanently, died in Seville in 1949 and is buried in the Parroquia del Divino Savior. His daughter María de las Mercedes, grandmother of the current King, who was then living in Estoril with her husband, never forgave Franco for not granting him permission with the necessary haste to say goodbye to his father on his deathbed, something which he did anyway without the approval of the authorities, although he was late for the last goodbye.
https://www.sevillainfo.es/noticias-de-sevilla/s-m-el-rey-felipe-vi-en-san-telmo-de-vuelta-en-casa/