Eugenia Martínez Vallejo was barely six years old when her parents opened the door to a messenger from the royal court. She had spent most of her short life hidden inside the family home in a remote settlement in northern Spain, kept away from neighbors who mocked her for her extraordinary size. Now the king himself had heard of her and wanted her brought to Madrid. Her parents were uneasy, but they were in no position to refuse.
Born in 1674 in Marinda de Montij, Eugenia was the daughter of José Martínez Vallejo and Antonia de la Bodega, a couple of humble background. According to the accounts of the time, her mother’s waters broke one Sunday morning while she was in church, and she gave birth there before she could reach home. Those present took the unusual circumstances as a good omen, and some later writers suggested this was the reason the child was named Eugenia, meaning the well-born. As a baby, Eugenia was described as healthy, strong, and blessed with a very good appetite.
In the seventeenth century, particularly in rural areas where doctors were scarce, infant mortality was devastatingly high. In England at the time, twelve percent of children died in their first year and thirty-six percent before the age of six. A plump child was often seen as a positive sign, an indication of fertility and, in some cases, wealth. So her parents did not worry much at first.
But as she grew, the worry set in. Eugenia grew far faster than other infants. Accounts claimed she looked like a twelve-year-old before her first birthday, likely an exaggeration, but by the age of one she reportedly weighed around twenty kilos. Her siblings grew normally, but Eugenia continued to grow at an alarming rate.
Her parents consulted a physician and put her on a strict diet. Nothing helped. As she grew larger, the cruelty of her neighbors grew with her. She was constantly made fun of, and her parents tried to shield her by keeping her inside the house.
But word of the giant girl spread to nearby towns and villages. Strangers approached the house to catch a glimpse of her and mock her appearance. By the time she was six, she supposedly weighed around sixty-five kilos. Most of her days were spent confined to her room, where no one could see her.
Then came the royal summons. Charles II of Spain, known as the Bewitched, had heard of the mysteriously large girl and was intrigued. In 1680, Eugenia was taken to the royal court in Madrid with her parents. The royal tailor quickly made her a dress so she could be presented before the king.
Charles II was fascinated by her appearance and suggested that she be taken care of as part of the royal court. Her parents accepted. A chronicler of the period, Juan Cabezas, published a pamphlet announcing her arrival, writing that the wonders of nature had come to the court in the form of a giant girl named Eugenia Martínez. He described how His Majesty, realizing she was a miracle of nature, decided to see her and asked that she be brought to his royal palace.
There, he wrote, she was admired by the royal household and all the nobility of the kingdoms. The king’s interest may have appeared generous, but it had a deeper and darker purpose. Since medieval times, European courts had kept entertaining characters of every sort. In Spain they were known as gente de placer, people of pleasure.
The group included jesters, dwarfs, people with deformities, and even the insane. They were kept around for the amusement of the court, and Charles II especially enjoyed their company for the purpose of ridiculing them. Eugenia was exhibited at palace parties, where ladies sought to be drawn or painted next to her to emphasize the beauty of their own slender figures. She and the others like her received no payment for their long hours of service.
They lived entirely at the mercy of their lords, who could cast them out penniless whenever they chose. Some saw this as a grave misfortune, a life of being mocked as a human exhibit. Yet for others, it was a stroke of luck. The nobility spent considerable money on the gente de placer.
They were well fed, kept warm in winter, and given a varied and interesting wardrobe, far more than most peasants of the day could expect. But in return, they were treated as objects, used for whatever amusement their masters desired. Charles II’s father, Philip IV, was recorded to have kept around one hundred and ten court dwarfs. Much of the nobility did the same, using dwarfs to reinforce the idea of perfection and superiority of the ruling dynasty.
What made Eugenia stand out was the king’s decision to commission two portraits of her. The artist chosen was Juan Carreño de Miranda, who had been appointed court painter to the queen in 1671. Both portraits now hang side by side at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. In the paintings, Eugenia appears sad and uncomfortable.
Posing for long periods would have been physically difficult given her size. The titles of the works are blunt and cruel: La monstrua vestida and La monstrua desnuda, the monster clothed and the monster undressed. The court’s treatment of her is visible in the way Juan Cabezas described her. He wrote that she was pale and not too unpleasant to look at, though her face was overly large.
Her head, face, neck, and other features, he claimed, were the size of two men’s heads. Her stomach, he said, was as huge as the fattest pregnant woman about to give birth. Her thighs were so thick and full of flesh that one became confused and astonished. Her feet were proportionate to her body, but she had trouble getting around because of her excessive size.
At the time, no one understood what afflicted her. Modern medical speculation suggests she may have suffered from Prader-Willi syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by the loss of function of specific genes on chromosome 15. Children with the condition are constantly hungry, which can lead to obesity and type 2 diabetes. They often have narrow foreheads, small hands and feet, short stature, light skin and hair, and are usually unable to have children.
Many of these symptoms match the historical reports of Eugenia, though certainty remains impossible. Within the palace, Eugenia was frequently mocked as she moved from place to place, tiring easily and struggling to keep up with others. It is believed she had hormonal problems and was infertile, never having her period even in later life. Yet despite the poor health and the mockery she endured, it is thought that she enjoyed living at the palace.
She was described as a pleasant girl who became quite popular at court, appreciated even by the royal family. As she entered her teenage years and adulthood, she remained well liked. Eugenia Martínez Vallejo died in 1699 at the age of twenty-four. She had lived her entire life in the palace after being taken in at six.
The exact cause of her death and the location of her remains are unknown, though it was likely connected to the condition she had suffered from her whole life. Centuries later, in 1997, the city of Avilés in Spain commissioned a bronze statue in her honor, created by the sculptor Amador González Evia. It depicts Carreño de Miranda’s most famous painting, La monstrua vestida, and stands on the street named after the artist in the Barrio Marinero de Sabugo.
The girl who was once hidden from her neighbors, exhibited before a king, and immortalized as a monster in paint now stands in a city square, remembered less for the cruelty she endured than for the strange fate that carried her from a remote village to the palace of the Spanish court.