Hola,

How might I get a photo of the King and Queen? I would like something about 22" X 16", that I could frame and put on my living room wall. Any information will be appreciated.

Thanks, Grulla.

Hmmm... You mean like a posed, totally "Royal" photo? I would think you could get one online somewhere. Have you done a Google.com search?

Too small to print, but you can use the downloadable pictures at Spain\'s Casa Real Website as your desktop's background.

I have no idea on where to buy that kind of pictures, and not only in Net, but in the real World, either. If I found something related, I'll post.

If you write to the Casa Real with your request, I'm 95% sure that they'll send a signed official photograph to you.

pim

Thanks all,

I'll give it a try, Grulla.

You could send a request to prensa@casareal.es or try their media relations director:

Sr. Juan González-Cebrián Tello
Director de Relaciones con los Medios de Comunicación
Palacio de la Zarzuela
28071 Madrid

Thanks Silvita. I will send a letter to Senior Tello.

But don't forget to call him Sr. González-Cebrián rather than Sr. Tello!

I don't know if the Spanish surnames system is widely known by people in this board, but I'll try to explain.

As a preface, I suppose that you all know that women don't change their names when married, and that having more than one First Name is very common in Latin countries, like Spain, Portugal, France or Italy. So, we have José María Aznar, Pierpaolo Passolini, and Jean-Paul Belmondo, for instance. Italians use to join both, French hyphenate them, and we simply put one after the other.

We all have two surnames, one being father's First Surname and the other being mother's. So, if my father is called Dad SurA SurB, and my mother is Mom SurC SurD, my name will be Myself SurA SurC. This is the full and official name but in everyday conversation we shorten it often, using only the First Name (or Names) and the First Surname. So we talk about José María Aznar, but his full name is José María Aznar López.

Doing some paperwork it is possible to officially join your two surnames in order to create a compound surname that works as if it were one. When joined, they are hyphenated, as it is the case of the media relations director of the Casa Real. This can be done for several reasons, but the most usual ones are a) the First Surname is too common and the person wants to be more 'special', b) the Second Surname is very rare and the person wants it to be transmitted to his/her descendants.

In the recent years (not more than 5-7) there was an amendment to the Surnames rule in order to guarantee the equality between men and women. When a couple have their first child, they can choose whether the father's surname goes in the first position, or the mother's. Whenever the decission is, they have to follow it for the rest of the children they have, to ensure all the siblings have the same surnames.

Thanks, Torrales.

I thought that I might be making a mistake with that. I knew that it was Pablo Ruiz Picasso, but he prefered Picasso because Ruiz is like Smith in English.

Grulla.