SPAIN’S most-read romantic novel writer has never had a love-life of her own, a surprising report in national daily El País reveals.

Corín Tellado, who died in hospital last week just shy of her 83rd birthday, wrote more than 4,000 Mills-and-Boon-style love stories.

She is said to be the country’s most widely-read author after Cervantes.

But Tellado, born María del Socorro Tellado López, only had one three-year relationship, which was doomed from the beginning.

She met and fell in love with the man she thought  would be her soulmate for life in Gijón in 1958, then aged 32 and having been publishing romance fiction since the age of 20.

But Domingo Egusquizaga, from the Basque Country, turned out to be the wrong man for Corín.

Her first-ever relationship led to marriage a year later, but Corín revealed to the press shortly before she died that the cracks were already beginning to show in the marriage on their honeymoon.

Tellado says Domingo was a ‘handsome man and a good person’, but that they had ‘nothing in common’.

“He would have been happier with another woman, and I’d have been happier with another man,” the author told reporters.

Their loveless marriage produced two children, Begoña and Txomín, but ended in 1961 – just three years after they had met.

Corín never had another relationship again, and was unable to remarry since divorce was not legal in Spain until the early 1980s.

But she received regular letters from her ex-husband for many years after their separation – although Corín never opened them.

When her former husband died, Corín burnt all his letters without having read them.

“I’m a realist. I’ve never said ‘I love you’ to anyone,” Corín told reporters in 1987. “I get excited by real, tangible things – sunsets don’t seduce me, nor do full moons or starry skies.”

“I’ve only ever said ‘I love you’ through characters in my novels.”

Among Corín’s tales of love with happy endings and pink fluffy clouds are 26 erotic novels that she published in 1979 under the pen-name of Ada Miller.