As she marks her 83rd birthday, Queen Sofía of Spain isn’t showing any signs of being willing to slow down her agenda.
Last year, Her Majesty celebrated her 82nd birthday a couple of weeks after watching her granddaughter hand out the most restricted Princess of Asturias Awards, which, for the first time, were not held in the usual Campoamor Theatre but in the Covadonga Hall of the Reconquista Hotel in the Asturian capital of Oviedo.
In between the two Princess of Asturias award ceremonies, Her Majesty has carried out a number of engagements, both on behalf of the Crown and for her own foundation patronages.
In the fall of 2020, the Reina Sofía Foundation launched Operation Cold to equip food banks with fridge trucks and storage facilities to provide users with fresh produce in addition to products that are less perishable.
Following the start of this initiative, the Queen toured lots of food banks that adhered to the project to visit and see first hand the impact this initiative was having on the population, in a moment in which more people than ever are relying on such help to survive the economic and social toll the prolonged shutdown had on their livelihoods.
Her Majesty also continued to work for the other two areas she is most involved with: rare diseases, cancer being among her primary focuses, and the environment.
Queen Sofía took part in a series of conferences and events that highlighted the technological, medical and research progress made in medical science and handed out prizes to associations that work in the sector. She also took part in litter cleanup days to celebrate critical environmental milestones (such as World Earth Day) and give the areas back to their legitimate users, whether they are wildlife or people.
And she did all of this while facing scrutiny from explosive revelations about her husband. She never gave an interview or even a remark to the press about any of it, and it seems clear that the marriage is not on solid footings anymore; while Queen Sofía has remained in Spain to continue supporting her son and daughter-in-law in their daily task of representing the country, King Juan Carlos stopped receiving his yearly salary in March of 2020 and has since moved to the United Arab Emirates, to at least partly escape the backlash from the several investigations currently open about him and his finances.
If her health doesn’t decline, it is expected that Queen Sofía will continue to support the monarchy at the pace she has been in the past few years, both in Spain and for selected celebrations abroad.
The former Queen is now back in Spain after a hectic weekend on the 22nd and 23rd of October 2021, in which she attended the Princess of Asturias Awards on Friday and her nephew, Prince Philippos’s wedding to Nina Flohr in Greece on Saturday.
