Not even in the republican periods of the history of Spain has the military training of our kings been denied. It does not matter if they were in exile, as happened with the great-great-grandfather of Princess Leonor. About to turn 11, Alfonso XII had to leave the country when the Glorious Revolution of 1868 ended the reign of his mother, Isabel II, and began the Democratic Six-Year Period. The ex-queen settled with her children in Paris, where the Prince was enrolled, first of all, in the elitist Stanislas College to train in politics.
In 1870 he traveled to Rome to receive the first communion of Pius IX, but his mother was unable to get the Pope to publicly recognize the Bourbons as the legitimate holders of the rights to the Spanish throne. Despite this, the ex-queen was convinced that the dynasty would reign again and she continued to be determined to train her son. At that time, moreover, her supporters were convinced that the much-desired restoration would only take place if Isabel II abdicated in Alfonso, which she finally did in June of that same year.
The Royal Family then moved to Geneva, where a program was devised for Alfonso in which special attention was paid to his training in the humanities, constitutional law, gymnastics, and culture. And, when Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was appointed head of the Alfonsino dynastic cause in August 1873, during the First Republic, he decided that the time had come for the Prince to begin his military training and “stop being a schoolboy.” Exactly the same thing that the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, announced this Tuesday with respect to Doña Leonor.
The current Princess of Asturias will follow in the footsteps of Alfonso XII and all the Kings of Spain, but above all, those of her father, Felipe VI, during the next three courses at the Land, Sea and Air Force academies. La Heiress, who concludes her second and last year of international baccalaureate at the UWC Atlantic College in Wales at the end of May, will join the General Military Academy of Zaragoza in the second half of August, where she will enter as a lady-cadet until the formal oath of allegiance, after which he will join the second year of officer training.
Princess Eleanor
After the two-week reception camp and the first phase of instruction and training -about seven weeks-, the Princess will receive basic physical and military training, as well as notions of topography, weapons, leadership, tactics and logistics, fundamentals of business administration , environmental engineering, mathematics, physics and chemistry.
Surely, that year will help the Princess of Asturias to also get to know different military units of the Army and, the following academic year (2024-2025), she will travel to the Marín Naval Military School, in Pontevedra, where she will attend the third course. With the job of midshipman, she will later embark on the Juan Sebastián de Elcano, “just like her father did.” The current King did the same between 1985 and 1986, who already received sailing lessons on the same ship and the use of rigging and navigation instruments, such as the astrolabe, to get used to the harsh conditions of life at sea.
In her third and last year of military training, between 2025 and 2026, Doña Leonor will attend the General Air and Space Academy of San Javier (Murcia) as a student lieutenant, where she will receive courses corresponding to the fourth officer course. At the same institution, Felipe VI learned to fly helicopters. The Princess of Asturias would have to learn with the EC-135. “The experience acquired by HM the King during his time at the academies is a valuable precedent for considering it adjusted that the military training of the Princess of Asturias also last three academic years, one for each Army and Navy”, underlines the Casa Real in a statement.
Alfonso XII, in a photograph from 1870
Alfonso XII
The objective of Cánovas del Castillo in 1873 was to turn the future Alfonso XII into a “King-soldier”, because “all honest military men must be given the hope that from now on and as soon as Don Alfonso is in Spain, he will take into account he a true boss and that under him he will serve the Homeland, “he explained by letter to Isabel II. Thus, in October 1974, with two months to go before the end of the First Republic, the 17-year-old Prince was sent to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, in Great Britain.
“Don Alfonso has already been in Austria for too long for it not to be convenient to transfer him to a country where there are more constitutional traditions as soon as possible,” commented Cánovas del Castillo in the same letter, always very attentive to the education of the future monarch with the supervision of the duke. of Sesto. The historian Ramón Villares referred to the Prince’s time at the Sandhurst Academy as follows: «He acquired a command of languages and a regular knowledge of European history, as well as some of the most appreciated political theorists of the time, such as Walter Bagehot and Benjamin Constant […]. The most novel thing is that he was the first monarch of modern Spain who had been educated almost entirely in exile, without pomp or etiquette ».
Alfonso XIII
The education of his posthumous son, Alfonso XIII, began shortly before he was eight years old. The first thing that stands out is that it was entrusted, almost exclusively, to the military: a general from the Artillery, José Sanchiz, and another from the Navy, Patricio Aguirre de Tejada, were in charge of it. As second echelon, two commanders, Juan Loriga, from the Artillery, and Miguel González de Castejón, from the General Staff. The first two were listed as heads of studies and the next two as teachers of mathematics and general studies. «It was common in Europe at the time and it continued to be so even for the grandson of Alfonso XIII», Javier Tusell points out in ‘Alfonso XIII. The controversial king’ (Taurus, 2012).
He got up every day at 7:30 a.m. and received riding lessons on the El Pardo mountain. He always returned at tea time, showing that the British influence of his reign predated the years of his marriage to Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg. He then continued his studies in the afternoon and lasted until night, always alone, except in military training, which at that time he did three days a week with seven other children from known families. According to some historians, this was authoritarian, clerical, old, very repressive and scarce.
When he turned 12, there were changes in his schedule and, before eating, he did gymnastic exercises and three times a week he gave fencing lessons or carried out military drills with children his age, all of them sons of aristocrats. , which used rifles smaller than the regulation ones. His military training continued and intensified at the end of 1898, at a time when the peace of Paris that liquidated the Spanish colonial empire was being discussed, and he followed in the footsteps of his father’s.
Don Juan Carlos, during military training at the General Military Academy of Zaragoza, in 1955
Juan Carlos I
After the lapse of his father, Don Juan de Borbón, who did not reign due to the proclamation of the Second Republic and the almost forty years of Franco’s dictatorship, Don Juan Carlos was finally the heir. On December 12, 1959, he received the dispatches from the Military Academy and concluded his military studies after “four long years of efforts and sacrifices,” ABC noted on his day. «A soft light, thin as a knife, fell from the sky. In the background the hill of San Gregorio rose solemnly, and the domes of El Pilar looked like gray pearls on the clean gorge of the Ebro,” Luis María Ansón wrote in this newspaper.
Under that atmosphere, the Francoist Army Minister, Antonio Barroso, gave Don Juan Carlos the office of Lieutenant of Infantry; Admiral Antúnez, the lieutenant of the ship, and General Lacalle, the lieutenant of the Air Force. Two days before he left the Academy, his classmates organized an emotional farewell for him. “Embraced, squeezed, lifted on his shoulders, deafened by the applause, he was able to verify the deep, indelible mark that he has left among those who have been his companions in the harsh exercise of military life”, could be read in the same Time.news.
On that same stage, he had sworn in the Spanish flag four years earlier, the same one that his great-grandmother, Queen María Cristina, had embroidered with her own hands. On that occasion, the still Prince sent his father, Don Juan de Borbón, the following telegram: “Before my flag, I have promised Spain to be a perfect soldier, and with tremendous emotion, I swear that I will fulfill what I have said.”
During his military training, the King practiced various disciplines that led him to go around the world aboard the Juan Sebastián Elcano, together with his fellow midshipmen, and to settle in Murcia at the San Javier Academy as part of his training in the Army of the Air. That period of instruction marked him so much that, in 2005, dressed in the uniform of Captain General of the Army, he took advantage of the commemoration of the golden anniversary of his promotion to renew the oath “with the same enthusiasm as 50 years ago.”
Philip VI
Finally, Felipe VI, to whom Don Juan Carlos dedicated these words in the past: «Felipe is a blessing from heaven and a charming person. He is very prepared, I would say that of the princes of Asturias he is the best prepared that there has been so far ». The King Emeritus spoke about the military education of his son, which was the same one that his granddaughter will receive, which was designed with the objective that both of them could face his historical responsibility.
Felipe VI began his military training in 1985 and also spent three years. At that time, the Government of Felipe González ensured that we saw images of the future King as if he were one more. In the daily life of the recruit, the cadet, the Bourbon soldier. He had previously studied EGB and BUP at the Santa María de los Rosales School, in Aravaca, the same one that Princess Leonor attended and the Infanta Sofía attended. Later, the Kings decided that he would complete his studies at the prestigious Lakefield College in Ontario.
It was upon his return from Canada that Felipe began military training, going through each of the three military academies. Prince Felipe, however, had already dressed as a soldier in 1977, when, at the age of nine, he signed the document of basic training affiliation in the ranks of the King’s Immemorial Infantry Regiment Number 1, the oldest in the Army, in whose ranks Alfonso XII was also in his day. In an emotional speech, Don Juan Carlos commented to him: «Felipe, you have to be a good soldier, the best, the most self-sacrificing, the most sober. Today is a big day for you.”
His first destination was the Zaragoza Military Academy. On October 11, 1985, she swore to the same flag as Queen María Cristina. In September 1986, she entered the Marin Military Naval Academy and, four months later, embarked on the Juan Sebastián Elcano, which was making its sixth round-the-world trip. The patterns were repeating. On board this, he himself took a historical photograph, with his father and his grandfather. Three generations that had passed through the training ship.