Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Forty Years Young - Queen Letizia Sends Fad Juventud a Video Full of Heart as Its Famous Campaigns Turn 40

Forty years of talking to young people – and being listened to. Fad Juventud, the youth foundation whose awareness campaigns have been part of Spanish growing-up for two generations, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and on Tuesday, October 20 it received the congratulation it will treasure most: a warm video message from Queen Letizia, the foundation’s honorary president, praising four decades of work that reached millions of homes.

The foundation shared the moment in a reel on its Instagram account @fadjuventud, which quickly drew close to 3,000 likes and more than a hundred comments. The still from the video is classic Letizia: direct to camera, hands clasped, in a dark green trouser suit and pale blouse against Fad Juventud’s soft blue backdrop, two boys from the foundation’s own imagery visible at the edge of the frame. It is less a royal address than a friend of the house stopping by, on camera, to say well done – and keep going.

The campaigns a whole country can hum

The Queen’s message, as the foundation describes it, highlights the awareness-raising work carried out through its campaigns – and here the anniversary earns its headline, because these are not obscure spots. Fad Juventud names three that, in its own words, have marked generations and become part of the collective imagination: “El gusano”, “Enganchate a la vida”, and the most recent, “Desconecta la ciberviolencia”, which turns the foundation’s lens on online harassment and urges young people to disconnect from cyberviolence. Forty years is a long time in media, but a slogan that parents and teenagers both remember is the rarest currency in public communication, and this foundation has minted several.

There is a quiet data point in the anniversary itself. Fad Juventud was speaking to Spanish youth about healthy choices years before social media existed, and it is still speaking to them now, inside the very feeds where they live, about the newest pressures those feeds create. The medium changed completely across the foundation’s lifetime. The method – short, memorable, emotionally honest campaigns that treat young people as intelligent – did not.

An honorary president who shows up

Queen Letizia’s link to the foundation is formal – she is its presidenta de honor – but the video lands because it does not feel merely formal. Youth wellbeing and education sit at the centre of her public work, the same instinct that put her at pupils’ desks in Melilla last week, as our school-visit report described, and beside Isabel Allende at the Premio Planeta, as our Barcelona report recounted. In each setting the pattern repeats: the Queen uses her visibility to amplify people doing long, unglamorous, cumulative good, and a 40-year-old youth foundation is almost the definition of that.

Fad Juventud, for its part, received the message exactly as it was meant. The foundation thanked the Queen for her words of recognition toward everyone who forms part of its work, and for choosing to accompany the anniversary so personally, and it restated the pillar on which the next forty years will be built: awareness, crafted each year, in its phrase, with care and heart, so that the campaigns stay with young people over time. Its closing line doubles as a promise and a toast: toward another 40 years.

Anniversaries can be backward-looking affairs. This one, pointedly, is not. A Queen on a phone screen, a foundation fluent in the language of feeds and reels, and a new campaign about switching off online cruelty: the oldest youth-awareness voice in Spain marked its fortieth birthday by doing exactly what it has always done, in the format of the moment. If the next forty years produce even one more slogan a whole country remembers, Tuesday’s video will be remembered as the day the campaign for them began.

Photo: @fadjuventud

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