Note: This article is from the Guardian.

This article titled “How Spain rebranded the Duchess of Alba to suit its aspirations” was written by Miguel-Anxo Murado, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 7th October 2011 13.45 UTC

It’s been the wedding of the century in Spain. Yes, one of those ever more frequent weddings of the century (you now get almost one per year). The fact that the bride is one of Spain’s richest women and the quintessential aristocrat (according to the Guinness Book of Records, she is the person with the most titles in the world), would have sufficed to attract attention.

But then this was also her third wedding, and she was marrying at 85, and the groom was 24 years her junior, and he happens to be a clerk who until last week lived on a €1,500 a month salary … how could the media resist it? Especially considering that the wedding was preceded by three years of acrimonious upper-class soap opera: her daughter and sons objected to the marriage; the king and even some journalists objected. But at the end of the day, she got her way. She ignored royal advice and silenced her offspring by handing them their inheritance in advance, a system which didn’t work very well for poor old King Lear.

And there she was the other day, dressed in traditional maja fashion, like one of her ancestors, who Goya once painted, and dancing a sevillana outside the church with her shoes off, an involuntary nod to Ava Gardner’s role in The Barefoot Contessa (1954). Only that Cayetana de Alba is no simple countess, but 20 times countess, 18 times marquise, five times duchess and God knows what else.

What I find extraordinary about the whole affair is that, for so many people, she has become the ideal of a free spirit, of an unconventional anti-establishment woman; she, of all people. And this is yet more baffling when you consider the transformation undergone by the House of Alba in the Spanish people’s perception, an incredible exercise in rebranding, which this wedding has taken to its final completion.

Not long ago, in the new Spain that arose after General Franco’s death, this very same duchess of Alba represented everything that was outdated: the hated landed gentry of Andalusia, old money, the stiff, posh aristocracy. When some of her peasants in Extremadura occupied the lands they had been cultivating for generations, she hounded them with a pack of lawyers and exacted an astronomical compensation.

Then it became known that she, as Spain’s biggest landowner, was getting huge amounts of money from EU funds intended to support farmers (some estimates put the figure at €1.8m yearly). Already in 2006, when she was awarded yet another title, that of Most Illustrious Daughter of Andalusia, there was rioting in the streets of Seville. “What do I care about these crazy people?” she famously said. And she was quite right, because by then things had started to change in her favour.

It had a lot to do with the irresistible ascent of the celebrity industry in Spain during the 1990s, a bubble of inanity that quite naturally accompanied the more material housing price bubble in those years. Since, contrary to what happens in Britain, the Spanish royal family was out of bounds for the press, the House of Alba more or less fulfilled the popular demand for aristocratic gossip.

They did not disappoint: plenty of marriages and divorces, a son who is a riding champion and a womaniser, the daughter who married (and divorced) a bullfighter … and, amid all this, the duchess herself, first harassed and ridiculed by the paparazzi, then praised as a caring suffering mother, and finally enshrined as the perfect celebrity. And loved, to the extent that the blind admiration of the masses for someone they barely know can be described as love.

The interesting thing is that she didn’t change at all, not one iota. It was Spain that changed. Nobody cares anymore about landless peasants, who are now foreign immigrants anyway, and what had been so much resented until then – her distant pride and her whimsical ways – is now celebrated as a sign of independence of character. She didn’t have to do anything, the press did it all. Her earlier elitist holidaymaking in Ibiza was recast as a “hippy past” and her patronising appearances at bullrings were seen as closeness to “the people”. The climax came when a TV biopic, as realistic as Tolkien, almost made her look as if she had been some sort of feminist and anti-Francoist.

After all, by then the housing bubble had turned Spain in a country of proud homeowners. What could be more natural than to reconcile themselves with the landowners? Not to mention how many people can relate today to a man who earns a little over €1,500 a month.

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