Spain’s 18th Duchess of Alba, who died on Thursday aged 88, was one of Europe’s wealthiest and most titled aristocrats, the owner of fabulous palaces and priceless works of art.

She died after a short illness, surrounded by family in the 14th century Palacio de Duenas in Seville, famous for its lemon-tree-filled courtyards and her favorite of her many properties.

Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y Silva, known to friends as ‘Cayetana’, was named by Guinness World Records as the world’s most titled person.

With her cloud of white hair and face moulded by plastic surgery, she was rarely out of the Spanish gossip magazines, most recently on the arm of her third husband, 24 years her junior.

Head of one of Spain’s oldest aristocratic families dating back to the 1400s, and the third woman to hold the title of Duchess of Alba in her own right, her wealth is estimated at between 600 million and 3.5 billion euros.

“I don’t like to talk about money. Many people confuse having cash with having assets – we’ve never had a lot of cash,” she wrote in her autobiography. The duchess also tells in her autobiography of how Spanish artist Pablo Picasso asked her to pose nude to recreate the painting, but her conservative first husband forbade it.

Born in 1926 in a neoclassical palace in Madrid, she spent much of her childhood in London when her father was ambassador to Britain and where she dined with Winston Churchill and played with Princess Margaret. Her father, an Anglophile and royalist, sided with dictator Francisco Franco at the beginning of Spain’s Civil War but relations grew frosty as it became clear Franco would not reinstate a king as head of Spain.

Credit: Yahoo News