A miniseries for Victoria Eugenia, queen misunderstood by a country she didn't understand

Calle de la Redondilla, near the Plaza de la Paja and the Segovia Viaduct, is pure history of Madrid and Spain. Located in the central district of La Latina, in the old neighborhood of Alfonso VI, it was the place where the philosopher María Zambrano grew up. It's a Tuesday in early October, but it might as well be May 31, 1906. An unusual autumn heat, fifty extras suitably dressed in period costume and a historic rented carriage make it easy to jump back in time. The scene recreates the eventful wedding day of Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg and Alfonso XIII, in one of the high points of Ena, the new historical series that Javier Olivares is preparing for RTVE, after El Ministerio del Tiempo and Isabel.

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Co-produced by the public broadcaster together with La Cometa TV and Zona App, it is a miniseries about the life of a specific queen and a very specific Spain, which goes from 1905 to 1945, based on the novel of the same name by the writer Pilar Eyre. It will tell in six chapters the changes in the life of Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg in a country marked by two world wars, a civil war and a great pandemic, the misnamed Spanish flu.

At the beginning of October, RTVE and La Cometa TV recreated the failed attack during the wedding of Victoria Eugenia and Alfonso XIII in Madrid.

Fictional stuff, at a time when filming is at a standstill, the actors Kimberley Tell and Joan Amargós, who play the Spanish monarchs, affectionately greet the actor Jaume Madaula, who plays the anarchist Mateo Morral, from the bridal vehicle. He was responsible for a bitter wedding gift. A bomb aimed at the couple killed 28 people, but failed to achieve its goal of assassinating Victoria and Alfonso, in what was the tragic beginning of a not-so-happy marriage. On the side of the street, a production crew collects canisters of dust, sand and fake blood. With all this, they intend to smear the extras of the series in a few minutes. The sequence of the explosion is so measured that it is shot the first time. It has been the result of months of preparation, explains Olivares.

In this case, the showrunner is happy with the result. It's always complex for a creator to see how what they came up with on paper is shot. It is even more so when that moment is a historical event that must combine rigor and entertainment with the limitations of any television production. "It's funny. In this business, there is a lot of talk about talent, when good talent hardly appears. Even when you have it, it's all pure technique, discipline and methodology. It all depends on everyone simply doing their job," he says inside a bar on the same street as Redondilla.

The Spanish character influences its own historiography. "It's very tendentious, that's why those who tend to tell it best, by far, are foreign Hispanists like Geoffrey Parker," laments the creator of the series. "And I am absolutely forbidden both to look at the past with current eyes and to induce the viewer to an opinion. I propose a landscape so that the audience can say what they want," he continues.

Although it is inevitable to make connections with the present. On the one hand, we have a good-natured Alfonso XIII, who treats everyone like you, has several secret children with lovers and has a personality with a great setback: he owns a pornographic company that he registers under the name of Royal. The profile is very familiar to Spaniards of the current monarchy. "In addition to having an enormous capacity for seduction, none other than Winston Churchill said of him that he was one of the great personalities of the time," warns Olivares.

A moment from the recording of 'Ena'. Olga Martin

But the real protagonist of the story is his wife, the Ena of the title. The story of a woman who left behind her family, her customs, her culture and who had to renounce her religion to live in a strange land (and in front of a people who did not come to worship her) needed the direction of two women: Anaïs Pareto and Estel Díaz. More than his marital relationship, the series focuses on the one he had with another woman, his mother-in-law, Queen Emeritus María Cristina, played by Elvira Mínguez. Was Victoria Eugenia a misunderstood queen? There was a disagreement in both directions, Olivares argues. She, with a British education and a concept of democracy and monarchy very different from the Spanish one, "also did not understand the country in which I lived, in which the monarch allowed a coup d'état," she says. That aspect of the queen made the screenwriter take a step back to recompose the character in his script.

There will also be some of the chapters of Ena Primo de Rivera, which will be played by Mariano Peña, and even an Ángel Ruiz who will give life to García Lorca, his same character in El Ministerio del Tiempo. Olivares already has a television universe of his own, a kind of historical version of Marvel's heroes, he jokes. The Spaniard is still waiting for some network or platform to dare to buy the series about King Juan Carlos I, a kind of Spanish The Crown, which he has written for The Mediapro Studio.

The recording of Ena, which does not take place at any time on set, began weeks earlier at the Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander, where the monarch spent much of her summers in Spain. And, as its two protagonists celebrate when they get out of the carriage, it benefits from the realism of having some of the real places where the events took place or others very similar: the Royal Palace of Madrid, the Palace of La Granja (Segovia), the Palace of Santoña (Madrid) and the Palace of Fernán Núñez (Madrid).

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