“At last, I’m at home after many decades away,” Leoncio proclaims in the video.
The treasure, known as the Archive of Medina-Sidonia, was housed in the palace’s attic.
A collection of 6 million documents, it spans nearly a millennium of Spanish imperial history.
Within its pages lie the secrets of the kings, dukes, and explorers of medieval Spain.
“I have inherited this legacy, which is legally mine,” she once declared.
“But morally, it belongs to everyone.”
In her will, Luisa Isabel left only 743,000 euros to Leoncio and his siblings, Pilar and Gabriel.
Leoncio’s homecoming video was a declaration of war.
“There’s a lot of tension,” says Gabriel, the black sheep of the family.
To drive home his disputed claim, Leoncio made a point of interrupting weekly palace tours.
“Welcome to my house!”
he would greet groups of startled tourists.
“Here, they only manipulate the truth.”
Liliane, ensconced upstairs with the archive she had been charged with safeguarding, kept her silence.
“Sometimes you don’t choose your destiny, it chooses you,” she once said.
“Personally, these past few years have been exceedingly difficult the stuff of nightmares.”
The family appeared to start off happily enough.
Standing beside her, Jose Leoncio appears tall, athletic, and handsome.
In reality, Luisa Isabel and Jose Leoncio couldn’t have made a more ill-suited couple.
Her ancestors had commanded Spanish armadas, served as prime minister, and owned vast swathes of southern Spain.
Her parents had fled the country during the Spanish Civil War.
Her new husband, by contrast, was a die-hard conservative who supported Franco’s dictatorship.
Luisa Isabel loved the night life.
But the Duchess never seemed to take to the role of mother.
The moment also marked the end of her marriage.
Her children remained behind in Madrid, where they were left in the care of Luisa Isabel’s grandmother.
“She rarely came to visit,” Gabriel recalls.
One day, when Gabriel was 6 or 7, his mother appeared at the door.
Gone were her elegant dresses and long hair.
Wafer thin, Luisa Isabel now sported men’s trousers and short-cropped hair.
There were rumors she was sleeping with women.
“Someone in the household said she was our mother,” Gabriel recalls.
“But for us, she looked like the boy who worked at the local grocery.”
“You’re not my mother!”
The change in Luisa Isabel ran deeper than fashion.
In 1964, the Duchess led a protest march of fishermen in Sanlucar.
Her noble pedigree gave her a measure of protection to speak out against Franco.
“This privileged aristocrat had a rebellious spirit,” as one newspaper put it.
She wrote letters and articles denouncing the conditions in Spanish prisons.
During her exile, Jose Leoncio seized on her political dissidence to secure custody of the children.
“The role of being a mother slipped away from her,” Pilar recalls.
According to Gabriel, he and his siblings were at their father’s mercy.
The children, by birth, were nobility.
But their lives felt anything but noble.
“The Red Duchess Returns” blared a headline in El Pais, a national newspaper, in 1976.
No longer closeted about her sexuality, she came across like a Spanish version of Sid Vicious.
By day, Luisa Isabel devoted herself to organizing the archives.
Historians came to admire her patience and diligence.
“She had no state support back then, nor any formal training.”
The Duchess both embraced and defied her status as an aristocrat.
“She was a traditionalist,” her nephew, Alfonso Maura, tells me.
“How could she spend all those years working on the family archives and not be?”
Andres Martinez, a historian and friend of the Duchess, casts her contradictory nature in more poetic terms.
“you could’t jump out of your own shadow,” he says.
By the following year, the request had been granted.
The most important and valuable asset of Medina-Sidonia’s ancestral heritage was now under the protection of the state.
It was at the wedding that Liliane Dahlmann, one of the bridesmaids, entered Luisa Isabel’s life.
The Duchess noticed Liliane immediately.
“I’ll make her mine,” the Duchess told her friend Capi Arenas during the reception.
Before long, Liliane had moved into the palace, where she served as Luisa Isabel’s secretary.
The relationship mellowed the Duchess.
“They were always together,” her friend Andres Martinez recalls.
“I couldn’t get the Duchess alone, ever.”
Luisa Isabel’s children were also suspicious.
The children also began to fight among themselves.
As the eldest, Leoncio had a role in deciding which family titles went to whom.
In 1993, King Juan Carlos I had named her Duchess of Fernandina.
Now, Leoncio maintained that the title should have gone to his son.
He launched a battle in the Spanish courts, stripping his sister of her noble name and privileges.
But as the estate’s administrator, the Duchess had spent much of the money.
He barely mentioned Pilar and Gabriel.
Now, he felt that Leoncio was only looking out for himself.
“My older brother tried to keep everything for himself and push us out,” she says.
Gabriel and Pilar took the nuclear option.
In 1989, they successfully sued their mother over the misspent money.
In retaliation, the Duchess banned them from the palace.
Gabriel arrived at around 10 o’clock at night.
At age 50, he and his mother hadn’t spoken in 20 years.
Leoncio and Pilar were already there.
The greetings between them were civil but not warm.
There were whispers about how the Duchess had carried out one final snub of her children.
Just 11 hours before her death, she had married Liliane in a civil ceremony.
Details of the wedding were hush-hush, but it granted Liliane legal control of the palace and the archives.
Gabriel had arrived at the palacewith a somewhat macabre mission in mind.
He wasn’t sure where this impulse came from.
Perhaps, after years of animosity and neglect, he wanted proof his parents were really gone for good.
Stepping away from the mourners, Gabriel entered the room where the Duchess lay in a casket.
She was “deteriorated, stiff,” he recalls.
He felt no despair, no sense of grief.
He took the camera from his pocket and held it over her body.
As he did, others in the room protested.
Gabriel took the picture anyway.
“He was her son, after all.”
Alerted to what was happening, Leoncio suddenly appeared and began chasing his brother around the room.
“He asked me to delete the photo,” Gabriel recalls.
It was a regression to youth, two middle-aged men sparring like adolescents in their mother’s grand house.
It was also a sign of the quarrels to come.
At first, the siblings worked in concert to challenge their mother’s will.
“I’m not surprised by any of this,” Gabriel told a reporter at the time.
“My mother made it clear that she was going to fuck us.”
The foundation was ordered to pay 27 million euros to the children as compensation.
To further complicate matters, Leoncio wasn’t satisfied with the ruling.
He was after something more than money.
Leoncio appealed the ruling and won.
But the victory proved pyrrhic.
Liliane, the court added, could continue to live in the palace.
The siblings were effectively owners of everything, and of nothing.
Infuriated, Leoncio decided to defy the court’s ruling and take matters into his own hands.
He moved into the palace, effectively becoming housemates with his mother’s widow.
“Cohabitation is uncomfortable,” he told a reporter.
“However, the house is big.”
Things got messy, fast.
In 2023, Leoncio ratcheted up the dispute.
He accused Liliane of taking money from his mother’s estate.
Both of them declined requests to speak with me.
Earlier this year, a judge found Liliane guilty of misappropriating funds.
She was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to repay 280,000 euros.
Her appeal is due to be heard by Spain’s supreme court.
On a hot morning last summer, I sit down with Gabriel at a busy cafe terrace in Madrid.
He also takes after his mother.
He has her rosy cheeks, her birdish eyes, her same stubborn drive.
Gabriel seems caught in a perpetual struggle to find his place in the world.
His mother, he tells me, “never wanted to have any relationship with us.
Above all, she saw us as a threat to the free disposal of her wealth.”
He claims he wants to mediate between his siblings and Liliane.
“I see the foundation as running like a business,” he says.
“What interests me is that it’s run well, not who runs it.”
But even those closest to him have trouble discerning his true intentions.
Pilar, for her part, sees the family drama as integral to both brothers' emotional makeup.
If her brothers remain bent on getting justice, she’s more interested in closure.
“All that sensationalism doesn’t matter,” she says.
Pilar is the first to admit that she has good reason to seek a settlement.
Some of the facades are crumbling like stale bread; others are as pristine as a Hollywood smile.
The Investigator’s Room smells sweet and woody.
There I find Liliane, quietly tapping away on her laptop.
True to her word, Liliane sits at the table beside me in silence while I study the archive.
Afterseveral hours, she abruptly leaves without uttering a word.
The history it contains is almost entirely physical.
A fire, or a robbery, could cause the documents to disappear forever.
They had succeeded at gaining part ownership of her estate.
But what they’d won seems more like a share in her disdain.
Matthew Bremner is a writer based in Spain.
The story also misidentified Gabriel as divorced; he and his wife never formally ended their marriage.
