Juan Carlos I (baptized as Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias; born in Rome, 5 January 1938) is the reigning King of Spain.
On 22 November 1975, two days after the death of dictator Francisco Franco, Juan Carlos was designated king according to the law of succession promulgated by Franco. The Spanish throne had been vacant for 38 years in 1969 when Franco named Juan Carlos as the next head of state. The Spanish Constitution of 1978, voted in referendum, acknowledges him expressly as King of Spain. The Spanish Constitution, Title II: the Crown, Article 56, Subsection 1, affirms the role of the Spanish monarch as the personification and embodiment of the Spanish nation, a symbol of Spain's enduring unity and permanence; and as such, the monarch is the head-of-state and commander-in-chief of the Spanish Armed Forces in a system known in Spanish as "monarquía parlamentaria" (parliamentary monarchy).
King Juan Carlos successfully oversaw the transition of Spain from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy.
Juan Carlos married Sophia of Greece and Denmark in 1962. The couple have three children and eight grandchildren.
Polls from 2000 show that he is widely approved of by Spaniards. According to the Spanish Constitution, the monarch is also instrumental in promoting Ibero-American relations, the "nations of its historical community". In this capacity, the King of Spain serves as the president of the Ibero-American States Organization, representing over 700,000,000 people in 24 member nations worldwide. In 2008 he was considered the most popular leader in all Ibero-America.
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