Humble Waiter or Son of a King? A Royal Mystery Piques Spain.
Albert Solà says he is the son of Juan Carlos, Spain’s former king. He has spent much of his life investigating what sounds like a modern fairy tale.
LA BISBAL D’EMPORDÀ, Spain — The man serving the drinks at the pub is Albert Solà Jimenez, and he has quite a tale to tell.
It starts when he was an orphaned child, at first raised by peasants on a Mediterranean island, then whisked to a mansion in Barcelona. There were rumors of his “noble birth,” he says, whispered by generals and diplomats. Then came a Spanish secret agent who offered to connect the dots on his origins, he says.
“It’s quite simple: I am the son of the king,” said Mr. Solà, as he carried two glasses of wine to customers in La Bisbal d’Empordà, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the hills of Catalonia, the northeast corner of Spain’s border with France.
The colorful paternity claim is unverified by almost anyone’s standards. And Mr. Solà would not be the first royal pretender to spin a good yarn. Take Anna Anderson, for instance, who was known for years as the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia. She claimed that she alone escaped the Bolshevik firing squad that murdered her father, Czar Nicholas II, and the rest of her family.
