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Exposición "Hace más de 40 años. El viaje de los príncipes a Etiopía"
In May 1972 - between the 4th and 11th of the month - the then Prince Juan Carlos and his wife Sofía made an official visit to Ethiopia, invited by the Emperor Haile Selassie I.
This was a sui generis return of the state visit which the Ethiopian Emperor made to Spain in April 1971. Sui generis because it was not the then Head of State, General Franco, who travelled to Addis Ababa, but Prince Juan Carlos who made the visit in his name, bearing for the occasion “a message of friendship and goodwill from the Spanish government”.
The photographic exhibition which is now housed at Casa África is the result of the hard work of the team at the Embassy of Spain in Ethiopia, which took on the arduous task over months of identifying photographs from that trip which were stored in different photographic archives: The EFE Agency, ABC, the Europa Press Agency and even in the National Archives of Ethiopia.
In all, seventy photographs - including some images from newspapers of the time such as the ABC or the Ethiopian Herald - make up the exhibition that was first seen in the National Museum in Addis Ababa and has now arrived at Casa África’s Sahel Room.
As a result of this same compilation work, there is also a book in photo album format to whose publication Casa África contributed in order to leave this historic milestone for posterity, since during the visit, the then prince and his wife became the first members of the Spanish Royal House to visit the quintessential African empire, with the intention of overcoming the distance that had existed between the two countries up to that time.
The book is available in our media library and the photographic exhibition can be visited from Monday to Friday from 9am to 6pm.