¡Hola! founder Mercedes Junco Calderón dies aged 99 – weeks after penning her final edition

Mercedes started ¡Hola!, the Spanish answer to Hello!, in 1944 – exactly 75 years ago – when she was aged 24, and its having described her in her obituary as a ‘tireless worker’ is something of an understatement, given that she was still working on it until this weekend, aged 99.

An ‘intelligent and brave woman’ and a national magazine editor ‘at a time when very few women were well-known in the professional world’, according to the report in ¡Hola!, Mercedes launched the publication jointly with her husband Antonio Sánchez Gómez, who was director of the newspaper La Prensa (‘The Press’) at the time.

They sought to produce a ‘weekly information’ publication with ‘plenty of pictures’, with the aim of ‘bringing out the froth in life – the part of reality that’s not heavy, doesn’t drown you, but which floats and keeps you afloat’; the lighter side of life they described as ‘the champagne bubbles and the soap suds’.

After another 24 years, in 1968, the couple decided to launch four additional editions a year dedicated entirely to fashion – two to haute couture and two to prêt-à-porter, to appeal to readerships on all incomes.

Chairwoman as well as editor and very much in charge since 1944, Mercedes was ‘very happy’ with her last-ever fashion edition, with its ‘beautiful front page’ which she chose herself and the reports and features which she had personally edited, published and often written, on top of her everyday work in the magazine office on weekly editions.

“She became a journalist for the love of it, and then learned to love her profession intensely, alongside her husband,” the dedication to her in this week’s ¡Hola! reads.

The article explains how the idea of the magazine came to her shortly after her wedding, and that she ‘filled it with good news and beauty’.

Mercedes attended the fifth National Fashion Industry Awards barely three months ago, where she was presented with the Media Prize at the hands of Queen Letizia, who launched the annual ceremony soon after her father-in-law Juan Carlos I abdicated and her husband became King Felipe VI.

After Mercedes was widowed in 1984, her son Eduardo Sánchez Junco took over as director of the magazine, with Mercedes still as editor, until he also died in 2010.

The current CEO of the ¡Hola! group, who now takes over as chief editor, is Mercedes’ grandson Eduardo Sánchez Pérez, who has been working with his grandmother on the magazine for 18 years and will now inherit the company.

In the photograph, Mercedes, at an official event in her capacity as editor, is well into her 90s.