He was born in Madrid, the eldest son of Prince Maximilian Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg and his wife María de la Piedad de Yturbe y von Scholtz-Hermensdorff, Marquesa de Belvís de las Navas daughter of Manuel Adrián de Yturbe y del Villar, Mexican ambassador to St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris and Madrid, and María de la Trinidad von Scholtz-Hermensdorff y Caravaca, Marquesa de Belvís de las Navas. Hohenlohe came, on his father's side, from a family which traced its history to the 12th century and were reigning Princes of the Holy Roman Empire in Württemberg until Napoleon I's invasion. His mother Piedad was Marquesa de Belvís de las Navas, granddaughter of Francisco-María de Yturbe, Mexican Minister of Finance, of Basque origin. King Alfonso XIII of Spain was his godfather at a christening in the royal palace. Alfonso had five siblings, Maria Francesca, Christian, Elisabeth, Max Emanuel and Beatrice. The hereditary wealth of the Hohenlohe family was depleted in the 20th century. His mother lost estates in the Mexican Revolution, and after the fall of the Third Reich, property in Germany and Czechoslovakia disappeared behind the iron curtain.
Early life
Alfonso was educated by private tutors in Bohemia and Spain, learning fluent German, Spanish, French and English. After World War II, the prince started to buy land in Marbella in 1947. He sold plots to various rich and powerful friends, including the Rothschild and Thyssen families. In 1954 he created the Marbella Club, the Costa del Sol's first luxury hotel, attracting many celebrities of the time to the former fishing village. On August 3, 1954, he survived a plane crash in Preston, Connecticut. The family fortune was replenished by Alfonso's marriage in 1955 to the 15-year-old Austrian-Italian Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, a Fiat heiress. The bride's youth evoked some scandal in high society, but the couple had obtained a papal dispensation for the marriage and 400 guests attended a 16-day wedding party. Five years later, the marriage was dissolved by divorce in Mexico City after Ira left him to marry notorious 1950s playboy Francisco "Baby" Pignatari, another papal dispensation being obtained, this time for an annulment, from the Church in 1969.
Later life
After the divorce, the prince had much-publicised relationships with actresses Ava Gardner and Kim Novak. In 1973, he married actress Jocelyn Lane. This too was a stormy partnership, and ended in divorce in 1985. In the 1990s, the property speculator Jesus Gil y Gil became mayor of Marbella, and the town entered a construction boom. The prince pulled out, selling his shares in the Marbella Club due to the area's increasing association with Arab arms traffickers and Russian mafia, whose conspicuous consumption was peppered with violence. He moved to the town of Ronda and successfully turned his efforts to wine-making, with new wife Marilys Haynes. His last wife died on 2 November 2000, apparently taking her own life, the same year he learned he had prostate cancer.
