Spain Visit

Spain's Queen Sofía celebrated her 70th birthday on Sunday with her family, although during the afternoon she attended a Mozart concert offered by Zubin Mehta at the new seat of the Albéniz Foundation and the Queen Sofía School of Art, where she had eight versions of "Happy Birthday" sung to her in the style of different composers.
Both the school and the foundation are in the same building on Madrid's Oriente square, a structure the queen inaugurated in September and the auditorium of which was officially inaugurated with the concert.
Foundation and art school director Paloma O'Shea said several days ago that the opening of the auditorium would be very special because Mehta and the queen will be there, and she added that "of course, we'll sing happy birthday" to her.
The Spanish royal family normally celebrates family events of this kind in private, but last January on King Juan Carlos's 70th birthday a dinner was organized at the El Pardo Palace to which more than 500 people were invited, most of them key figures in assorted areas over the 32 years of his reign.
For the queen's 70th birthday, various books have been published, some of them controversial.
The first to appear in bookstores on Oct. 15 was that put together by Carmen Enriquez, who has worked for Television Española (TVE) covering the royal household for 17 years, and Emilio Oliva, who has worked for Agencia Efe for eight years, entitled "Doña Sofia. La Reina habla de su vida" (Sofia: The queen speaks about her life), the third edition of which is already in preparation and in which heretofore unpublished remarks by the queen appear.