Their hope was to walk way with millions after handing over a letter penned by Christopher Columbus in 1498 to the highest bidder at a London auction.
But the family of the Duchess of Alba – the eccentric aristocrat who was once one of Spain’s best-known public figures, who died last November – have had their hopes stymied by a Madrid court decision to ban the letter from leaving the country, arguing that it is of “huge national importance”.
The foundation run by the House of Alba, one of Spain’s wealthiest and most noble families, has been trying for years to gain the necessary approvals to sell the letter, written by the man credited with discovering the Americas, to his son Diego. Written from Seville and dated 29 April 1498, it is valued at €21 million (£15m).
The foundation maintains that, as the letter wasn’t written from the Americas and is personal, it is the least significant of the 21 letters from Columbus in their collection and would have little effect on Spain’s cultural heritage if it were auctioned by British auction house Christie’s.
Proceeds from the sale, says the foundation, could provide funds to cover the upkeep of its vast collection, which ranges from palaces to artwork by Goya, Renoir and Picasso to an archive of 22,000 documents. The foundation has said that it receives no public funding and that attempts to secure external funding have so far been unsuccessful.
In 2013, Spain’s cultural ministry blocked the sale of the letter on the grounds that it was an intrinsic part of the country’s heritage, and recommended that the letter be granted protected status to ensure it could not leave the country. The family appealed the ministry’s decision, reasoning, among other things, that Spain’s effort to keep its national heritage within its borders went against the spirit of the European Union.
In a decision that was made public on Tuesday, a high court in Madrid sided with the cultural ministry, pointing to the “cultural, economic and historic importance” of the letter. While admitting that the EU does pave the way for cultural items to circulate freely, the judges asserted that it was within the rights of member states to ban works of cultural importance from leaving the country. The decision, the judges noted pointedly, “doesn’t impede the owners from selling the letter in Spain” but they also urged the foundation to consider other funding options.
The family downplayed the court’s decision. “If we can’t sell this, we’ll sell something else,” Carlos Fitz-James Stuart, Duke of Alba, told El País. “To conserve everything that we have, we need money.”
Fitz-James Stuart has headed the House of Alba since the death of his mother, the flamboyant duchess, last November. A mainstay in Spain’s gossip press, the outspoken duchess made headlines around the world when she married a civil servant 25 years her junior.
The duchess owned vast amounts of property, along with an art collection that included paintings by Goya and Velázquez, a first edition of Don Quixote, Columbus’s first map of America and the last will and testament of Ferdinand the Catholic, father of Catherine of Aragon. After her death, most of her vast fortune was split equally between her six children and the House of Alba foundation.
