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The day he saw the king have sex with his mother is a childhood memory that will never leave Angel Cristo.
Barbara Rey made a paella on the terrace of her family home for Juan Carlos before the couple frolicked in the pool.
The fun continued to the bedroom where Ms Rey and the long-serving Spanish monarch rekindled a romance that had begun nearly 20 years earlier.
But while Juan Carlos was indulging in an extra-marital affair behind the back of his wife, Queen Sofia, his mistress was engaged in her own act of skulduggery – one that would allegedly net her millions but also traumatise her teenage son.
Before the king arrived on that sunny afternoon in 1994, Mr Cristo, aged 13 at the time, was covertly stationed on their neighbour’s side of the garden fence.
He was tasked with capturing the liaison on his Canon EOS 700 camera.
The Telegraph has today published a selection of those photographs.
Mr Cristo also said he made edited copies of an explicit video showing Ms Rey, an actress and TV host, and the then King of Spain having sex in her bed.
The footage was recorded on a secret video camera installed by his mother.
At the time, Mr Cristo felt uncomfortable being co-opted into his mother’s blackmail plot and its subsequent unravelling has proven those instincts correct.
“I was only 13, but I was good with a camera,” he recalled in an interview with The Telegraph. “My mother said ‘what a pity you’re too young to help me with this. You couldn’t, though, could you’?”
Mr Cristo said he knew what he was being asked to do was wrong but his desire to help his mother resolve her financial problems convinced him.
Estranged from his mother now, he believes that in hindsight it was a form of child abuse.
“She went on and on until I said ‘yes, I´ll do it’. She manipulated me.”
Ms Rey is also alleged to have manipulated the Spanish state, using the compromising images as leverage for millions of pounds in hush money.
Spain’s secret service was rumoured to have paid as much as £3 million to buy the silence of the actress in a bid to spare the embarrassment of the royal family.
But last month the scandal resurfaced when Mr Cristo sold some of the photos to the Dutch magazine Privé for what he said was “a very modest sum”.
Now, 30 years after the footage was recorded, and 10 years since Juan Carlos’ abdication in favour of his own son, Mr Cristo has decided to tell his story.
He insisted that he was the victim of the plot, given his tender age at the time.
Juan Carlos, now 86, has refused to comment on the alleged relationship with Ms Rey or the dozens of other women he has been linked with in the media.
If the images had come to light in the 1990s, they would have rocked the country to the core because of Juan Carlos’ popularity as the incarnation of a new and modern Spain that had emerged from the decades of dictatorship before Francisco Franco’s death.
Having established a democratic system in the late 1970s, Juan Carlos was seen by millions of Spaniards as the hero that saw off an attempted military coup and presided over an unprecedented era of expanded liberties and prosperity, culminating in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and Seville Expo.
In tapes of phone conversations with his mistress, recently published by the online news site OK Diario, Juan Carlos described his marriage to Queen Sofía as loveless after the birth of their third child, today’s King Felipe, in 1968.
“We have no family life,” Juan Carlos can be heard saying to Ms Rey in a phone conversation from the mid-1990s, explaining that the royal couple lived in separate apartments in Madrid’s Zarzuela palace.
“Between you and me, and being selfish, it’s very comfortable for me because the Queen performs her job to perfection. And on top of that, she puts up with the situation and doesn’t run off with another man,” Juan Carlos explained.
Juan Carlos eventually abdicated in 2014 and took up residence in Abu Dhabi after a spate of financial scandals and persistent rumours about his promiscuity.
In March 2020, he was stripped of his €200,000-a-year stipend from the Royal Household’s budget by his son King Felipe after The Telegraph published information about secret overseas funds belonging to the former king.
His downfall was triggered by an accident that he suffered while on an elephant-hunting safari in 2012 with Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, his former lover.
Juan Carlos was flown back to Spain for an operation on his broken hip but the presence of the German businesswoman on the trip was leaked to the media.
In the taped phone conversations, Ms Rey can be heard telling a friend that the king had pursued her shortly after taking the throne in 1975.
“I was with him four and a bit years before getting married. And again after separating in 1989. We always had a telephone relationship, and we met on the odd occasion while I was married,” Ms Rey said on a tape obtained by The Telegraph.
In 1980, Ms Rey married Angel Cristo, a lion-taming circus master, and the couple had two children, Angel Jr and Sofía.
Ms Rey has spoken publicly about violent abuse that she suffered at the hands of the late Cristo, including a gun fired in a rage that narrowly missed her.
Once the couple’s messy divorce was concluded, Ms Rey found herself in need of money.
She had hoped to get her career back on track after several years of life in a circus caravan but she also confessed publicly to a life-long gambling habit.
“We talked a lot as I was the man of the house. She said Juan Carlos was a bad man, that he was treating her wrong,” Mr Cristo said.
Her escape, said Mr Cristo, was to blackmail the Spanish state into helping her back to wealth and success, using him as her secret photographer.
Ms Rey, 74, has always refused to speak openly on her relationship with Juan Carlos, although she has often discussed having had a sentimental link with “a high official of the state”.
The Telegraph asked Ms Rey about her son’s claims about the photographs and the rest of the recorded material involving the former king. She declined to comment.
Emilio Alonso Manglano, who was the head of the CESID secret service between 1981 and 1995, stated in his diaries that Ms Rey received large sums of money in return for not publicly revealing her affair with the king.
Manglano said he treated the blackmail episode as a matter of vital state importance and coordinated a response with Manuel Prado, Juan Carlos’ ambassador-at-large, who was later jailed for his role in a massive fraud case.
Mr Cristo said that secret service agents delivered around 25 million pesetas (£125k) in 10,000-peseta notes in a sports bag and that, in the autumn of 1994, Ms Rey returned to Spain’s TVE1 main state channel as the presenter of a new variety show.
When the show “Esto es espectáculo” ended in 1996, an alternative was found. Ms Rey performed a surprising career pirouette and became the host of a daytime cookery show on the Valencia region’s Canal Nou.
In 1997, Manglano wrote that a final deal was reached, in which the actress was paid 100 million pesetas (£500,000) by the government, plus a guarantee of receiving 50 million pesetas each year for a decade.
Alberto Saiz, one of Manglano’s successors as CESID chief, confirmed the series of payments on Spanish television in 2021, saying that the money had come from “external sources”.
Under the agreement, Ms Rey was meant to hand over all of the incriminating material but, according to Mr Cristo, she kept copies in her safe beneath her father’s armchair in Totana, her hometown, and in a bank deposit box in Luxembourg.
In 1997, Ms Rey reported to police three separate alleged break-ins into her home.
Mr Cristo confirmed two cases in which he interrupted presumed agents sneaking through the home.
Asked about the personal impact of working as a spy for his mother and making copies of the alleged sex tape with Juan Carlos, Mr Cristo said: “It is a kind of child abuse.”
On the TV programme De Viernes, Mr Cristo revealed photographs of Ms Rey having sex on a beach with Frank Frances, a later boyfriend of the actress.
He said his mother had tasked him with taking paparazzi-style photographs in order to sell them to a Spanish magazine.
“It’s strange to watch your mother with a man,” he said.
Spaniards are, meanwhile, coming to terms with listening to the so-called saviour of their democracy casually discussing matters of the state with an actress with whom he was having a casual fling.
In one tape recording revealed this month by OK Diario, Juan Carlos said the Socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez, the then prime minister, that ruled between 1982 and 1996 was “full of crooks”.
A number of Spanish journalists have admitted details of Ms Rey’s affair with Juan Carlos, including the existence of photographs and tapes, were known in media circles in the 1990s.
But media bosses did not want to confront the powerful Crown by publishing such material.
“At that time we were at the peak of self-esteem about the changes made over the previous 20 years, and the representative who embodied our newfound status was the king,” explained Lucia Mendez, a journalist from the newspaper El Mundo.
“There was a consensus among the elites, the politicians and journalists to let the king do what he wanted. But even now it is shocking to hear him discussing matters of state with a woman like Barbara Rey. Any person who behaves like this is clearly a danger to his own system.”
The Telegraph asked Juan Carlos’ representatives whether the former king would like to make any comment on his relationship with Ms Rey but received no reply.
Spain’s royal household, now led by Juan Carlos’s son Felipe VI, also declined to comment on the claims of the alleged use of public resources to pay off Ms Rey.
