It took the bluest of Europe's royal blood to produce Prince Juan Carlos Victor Maria de Borbón y Borbón. Tall (6 ft. 2 in.), curly-haired and athletically handsome, Juan Carlos is the grandson of Spain's last ruling King, Alfonso XIII, as well as a great-great-grandson of Britain's Queen Victoria and a direct descendant of France's Bourbon monarchs. Despite his lineage, however, the Prince is less the product of royalty than the creation of a commoner. Under the close surveillance and tutelage of Franco since he was ten years old, Juan Carlos has been so thoroughly molded in the image of el Caudillo that he might appropriately be dubbed "Francisco II." Often described as a storybook prince, he has in fact seemed more like the Sleeping Beauty of Spanish politics, a retiring figure patiently waiting for the kiss of Franco's death to free him from a somnolent existence lived in the shadow of the generalissimo's power.
Last Friday, Juan Carlos agreed to pose for TIME Photographer Eddie Adams at Zarzuela Palace, his official residence north of Madrid. The lines under his eyes reflected the strain of last week's uncertainties, but the atmosphere at Zarzuela was relaxed and, as palaces go, even homey. There was little sense of urgent state business at hand. Observed TIME's Madrid bureau chief, Gavin Scott: "Juan Carlos gave the impression that he had been cast in a role and he was ready to fill it out of a sense of patriotism. But there was nothing to suggest an eagerness for power."
Born in 1938 during the bloody chaos of Spain's Civil War, the Prince spent his early childhood shuttling between the various homes in exile that his family established after Spain became a republic in 1931. Juan Carlos' moderately liberal father Don Juan preferred exile to life under Franco's authoritarian rule; in 1948, though, he agreed to have his son educated in Spain under Franco's guidance. Hostility toward the Bourbon heir from both rightists and left-wing antimonarchists was so intense that the ten-year-old Prince became a virtual prisoner in Las Jarillas, a heavily guarded Madrid estate where he began private high school studies. There Juan Carlos received his first indoctrination into the quasi-Fascist philosophy of Franco's Movimiento National.
After studying for two years at the Infantry Academy in Zaragoza, the Prince was sent for a year each to the Naval School at Marin and the Air Academy at San Javier. Armed with commissions in all three services, Juan Carlos began his civilian education at the University of Madrid in 1960. Lest he be tempted by what his father called "the tra-la-la of Madrid," however, he was cloistered once again, this time 30 miles from the capital, with a retinue of chaperons that included two dukes, three colonels and a personal chaplain.