They have been married for 55 years and they found each other despite having the entire peninsula between them. Raphael was born in the sunniest Andalusia and Natalia Figueroa is from the north, from the wild and cold Cantabrian Sea. It must have been a matter of fate, because this couple brings together the two most opposite cardinal points in all of Spain.
Raphael's Linares
Hospital of the Marquises of Linares
The most legendary musician of our times was born in the heart of the deepest Jaén, in Linares where Manolete died and where the history of the Marquises of Linares has its most brilliant cradle. This Ibero-Roman city still proudly maintains the Hospital of the Marquises of Linares, built in 1905 in a neo-Gothic style, where the mausoleum is located.
St. Mary's Church
Other notable buildings are the Train Station, built in the 20th century with an eclectic style that mixes Mudejar and modernism, with stone and red brick walls. The bullring from 1887 where Manolete died, the San Juan de Dios Hospital, with a baroque façade and converted into the Palace of Justice or the fantastic church of Santa María, built on a mosque in Gothic style, and later renovated in Renaissance inspiration.
San Sebastián, the fishing village of Natalia Figueroa
His wife was born in San Sebastián, the pearl of northern Spain. And she did it in high birth, as the granddaughter of the Count of Romanones. This 12th century coastal town has it all. It has an old town with Gothic, Baroque and even Belle Époque monuments that we can discover in the church of San Vicente, the basilica of Santa María del Coro and the Town Hall, to name a few.
It also has beautiful beaches, such as Playa de la Concha, with that bay shape protected from the wind and crowned by the island of Santa Clara. It has mountains at both ends: Mount Urgull and Mount Igeldo, to enjoy nature.
Neither Andalusia nor the Basque Country: a Venetian-style wedding
How is it possible that an aristocrat from the Romanones family and a singer from a working-class family who emigrated to Madrid from a town in Jaén ended up together? Despite their equidistant origins, the couple met in 1968, becoming good friends and falling in love little by little, until they married in 1972. They did so in Venice and with maximum secrecy, trying to escape the media spotlight, without success.
Currently, the couple lives in a house called Los Martos, in an exclusive urbanization in Boadilla del Monte, in the mountains of Madrid. There is a lot of nature around them and they both enjoy privacy and intimacy, where they continue to share their lives more than half a century later.
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