Children of Spain’s ‘Red Duchess’ will share disputed US$36 million inheritance with mother’s lesbian lover

The multi-million-euro fortune of Spain's “Red Duchess”, which includes an Andalusian palace, has been divided between her three children and her widow after a legal wrangle.

Colourful aristocrat Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo y Maura provoked a final scandal just hours before her death in 2008 at the age of 71, when she married a much younger woman who was her long-time secretary and made out her will to her new spouse.

But a court in Sanlucar de Barrameda, where de Toledo maintained the ancestral palace, ruled that around 33 million euros (US$36 million) left in a foundation be divided between the children and Liliana Maria Dahlmann, the aristocrat’s widow.

The judge last week ruled that de Toledo had already given away more than a third of the estate during her lifetime, more than she was legally permitted to do so, documents showed.

The palace, situated in a rural area near the southern city of Cadiz in Andalusia, was declared a national heritage site in 1978 and is managed by the Spanish ministry of culture.

Its archive which contains around six million historical documents, the oldest of which dates back to 1228.