Spanish duchess hits fate for acceptable to Marry at 85

It's the substance of a soap opera starring European nobles: at age 85, one of Spain's wealthiest and most title-laden women desires to marry a bureaucrat young enough to be her son. To mollify her six cautious children, she's signed over to them lavish portion of her wealth.

She's a far away relative of Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill and you have to take a profound breath only to announce her name: Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva.

The tow time-married matriarch's highest title is Duchess of Alba, but she has over 40 others. Her 60-year-old beau is a man named Alfonso Diez, who works for the Spanish social security management.

They first convene about then years ago as her then husband — No. 2 — was friends with Diez's brother, an antiques trader and after organizing into each at a movie theater about three years ago the duchess and Diez finally began dating.

The Duchess of Alba said in a unusual radio interview previous this year that she desired to marry Diez but her children — five men and a woman — were opposed it. She rejected any suggestion Diez was a gold-digger.

"Alfonso does not want something. He has given up everything," she told COPE radio. "All he wants is me."

Last month the duchess and her children went to a notary in Madrid and she registered them to be possessor of palaces, castles and other property around Spain upon her death, according to extensive Spanish press reports. For now, though, she will keep control of the luck of the more than 500-year-old House of Alba.

A spokesman for the duchess, Lola Morali, refused to remark, stating in an email Wednesday that she and the duchess were on holidays until September.

The early divvying up of most of the huge family pie emerges to have pacified her children no less than somewhat.

Her youngest son, Cayetano Martinez de Irujo, age 48, said last week of his mother's want to marry Diez: "We have located the way out for her to be able to do it."

He said he and his siblings remained feeble, however, about the idea of marriage.

"I completely acknowledge their relationship, if it is what they say it is," Martinez de Irujo said, but persisted they should not get married.

"If at last my mother settles on getting married, we will attend even though we still do not agree," Martinez de Irujo told the newspaper El Mundo.

Another newspaper, El Pais, said guesses of the duchess' wealth — it comprise paintings by Goya and Velazquez and a first edition copy of Cervantes' "Don Quixote" — range broadly from euro600 million ($856 million) to euro3.5 billion ($5 billion).

But her luck is firm to compute. Partly it's because some of it is in stocks — by nature unstable, particularly these days. And the art masterpieces, classified as Spanish national legacy by the government, cannot be removed from the country and thus would be less pricey if sold, according to Jose Luis Sampredro, a historian who has written a book on the House of Alba.

What's more, the duchess owns things like historical documents that are merely priceless, Sampredro said in an interview.

"Who can say how much a letter from Christopher Columbus is value, and she has numerous," he said.