Niece of Juan Roig, president of Mercadona, and descendant of two of the most important business sagas of Valencia, we talked to Emma Roig-Askari about how she managed to close the Vatican for an exclusive group of collectors at Christie’s, where she works as an ambassador.

Seven years ago, Emma Roig-Askari (Valencia, 57) had just started working as an ambassador for Christie’s when at a meeting with the president of the auction house, David Linley, nephew of Queen Elizabeth II, she proposed her first project: to close the Vatican for 30 collectors. He raised an eyebrow and held back a laugh. A Spaniard, with an accent and telling them he was going to close the Vatican. “His disbelief gave me impetus. It took me six months of interminable negotiations but I was lucky and I did it. When I told Christie’s they couldn’t believe it”. But so it was. One day in May 2018 she stood with her collectors at the Vatican. “It was getting dark and the place was empty. We could hear our footsteps down the marble corridors with only the presence of the Swiss guard. To see the Sistine Chapel, the staircase of weeping and the private chapel of the Pope empty leaves an impression. The next day we were greeted by Pope Francis, which was an exceptional honour”. It was her first achievement. ‘Another time I asked José María Cano to lend me some of his paintings to hang at an exclusive dinner at Christie’s’, she tells me as she searches and rummages through her huge suitcases for some shoes that she wants to wear for the photo session that is happening at her home in Madrid. “Logistics made the move impossible, so with his usual wit he told me that if the paintings couldn’t go to Christie’s, Christie’s should go to the paintings, and he generously lent me his home. He is a true collector, who lives with art. He has works of art in the kitchen and in the gym and is himself a sought-after painter. Seeing pieces by some of the most important artists of the 20th century in such a relaxed atmosphere, where the host ends up singing with his son at the piano All you need is love was another unique experience”.

Emma’s life is like the anecdotes that she tells. Quirky, funny and unique. “Ever since I was a child I have wanted to see the world. 30 years ago I left Spain for a little while and I’m still wandering around”. As well as Madrid, she has homes in London and Ibiza and when you talk to her she is usually about to board a plane or has just got off another. Last night she arrived from the English capital and this very afternoon she will be leaving for Valencia. Two weeks later, she will email me from South Africa, where she has gone on safari with her husband and three children, and within a month she will call me from New York where she spends 15 days every three months for the work of her husband, a British financier of Iraqi origin. When her husband decided to leave Manhattan for London so that her children could benefit from the same British education as several generations of his family, Emma was forced to reinvent herself. She had just finished 11 exciting years as a journalist in New York, where she had arrived in 1991 with a Fulbright scholarship to do a Master of Arts at New York University and where she was a correspondent for El País and CBS Telenoticias, as well as Content Director for Plural Entertainment. With the move to London, a city she hardly knew, she had to start all over again. “As my friend Vicente Todolí says: “Your second passion can be more satisfying than your first”. And my second passion has always been art”.

“José María Cano generously lent me his house. He is a true collector who lives with art. He has paintings in the kitchen and the gym”.

Her collection includes a mini Picasso and a mini Miro, as well as works by Lucio Fontana, Peter Doig, Hurvin Anderson, Mark Bradford, George Condo, Loie Hollowell, Louise Bourgeois and Egon Schiele. And speaking of art Emma highlights the momentum Valencia has received through the initiative of her aunt, Hortensia Herrero, creator of the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero, in a 17th century palace restored by her architect daughter Amparo Roig – and Emma’s cousin – where she exhibits her private collection between impressive centenary walls: ‘She has created a wonderful cultural attraction in Valencia that in a few months has already become a reference point in our city’. Emma is the fabulous blend of her mother – “one of the most elegant women in Valencia, discreet, exquisite, educated at the best boarding schools. She had a fascinating library and a contagious intellectual curiosity”-. And her father, Francisco Roig, a brilliant man, stubborn, intrepid and fearless. “When I was 12 years old, he put me in front of a calf and told me: “If you are not afraid of this, you will not be afraid of anything”. He made me kneel down and everything. My mother was so delicate and my father… I don’t even know how to describe him. He dares everything. He has a brain that spills out half-genius, half-impossible ideas. When I was 16 he put me to work on Saturdays from six in the morning to two in the afternoon, scrubbing aisles and cutting sausages in a Mercadona. Working in the real world was going to show me what life was all about, I told myself. And it did. I experienced what my life would have been like if I had been born without privileges”.

This “education” of the Roig family goes back a long way. Paco’s father and Emma’s grandfather, Francisco Roig Ballester, founder of Cárnicas Roig and precursor of today’s Mercadona, quickly detected his first-born son’s hustling soul and, at the age of 16, took him out of school to send him to Germany to sell oranges. It was his first challenge. A number of others have followed. He even ran a coffee and timber plantation in Africa where Emma and her siblings would visit him. “We slept in the middle of the jungle in a house that was falling apart. He was an adventurer and raised us to believe that you should never give up.”

Her collection includes a mini Picasso and a mini Miró, among others. “Few of my paintings are larger than the size of an iPad. A friend of mine calls it ‘The stamp size collection”.

On his return to Valencia Paco settled in the alquería de los Roig, a house with land and palm trees that belonged to the family and that when it was built was on the outskirts of the city but today it is almost in the centre. He lives there with his second wife and 100 horses which he rode every Sunday until four years ago. The Roigs are a large family – Paco is the eldest of seven siblings: he, Amparo, Trinidad, Vicente (who died at the age of 17 of a brain tumour), Fernando, Juan and the youngest, Alfonso (with a disability and died in 2020 at the age of 65). “The love for the weakest that my grandmother instilled in us has been one of the strongest ties in the family,” says Emma. All of them, with their respective children and grandchildren, form a tribe of 108 members that gathers every Christmas to eat at the
football pitch of Villarreal, the club presided over by another of the brothers, Fernando Roig, who also owns the ceramics company Pamesa. Every year it is the turn of one of the brothers to organise the meal, this time it was the turn of Juan, and then the younger ones play a game of football on the pitch. All the Roigs have a special soft spot for their mother, Trinidad Alfonso, who died in 2006 at the age of 95: “The nicest woman I have ever known. On Sundays she would prepare paellas for everyone and she instilled in us the sense of family. When she was faced with adversity instead of drama she would do comedy. A genius. An inspiration for her children, grandchildren and generations to come. My children know all her stories. It’s the way to keep her principles alive”. Her uncle Juan has created in her honour the Trinidad Alfonso Foundation, which sponsors the Valencia Marathon.

Not only through her father’s side, but also through her mother’s, entrepreneurship is in her DNA. Emma is the great-granddaughter of Silvestre Segarra, one of the biggest shoe exporters of the last century who became rich after leaving to Africa with a bunch of espadrilles and selling them to a captain called Franco. ‘If they break in six months, I charge him half. If don’t, you pay me double’. That budding businessman shoed the Spanish army and with the money he earned he created Calzados Segarra, in La Vall d’Uixó, a village in Castellón where in the 1950s he built the Colonia Segarra, a town for workers with a hospital, sports centre and single-family homes.

But Emma was not cut out for business and what she really liked was telling stories. So at the age of 18 she went to study journalism in the capital, . She landed in Madrid in the eighties and rode the amusement park that is life at that age. She didn’t go to the university much more than to the Rockola, and she rubbed shoulders with all kinds of people, including the then aspiring actors Imanol Arias and Antonio Banderas, as well as the singer-songwriters Joaquín Sabina and Javier Krahe, whom she met thanks to the programme Si yo fuera presidente, where he was working as a scriptwriter. It was there that she discovered a woman who impressed her, Carmen Díez de Rivera, in her day Adolfo Suárez’s chief of staff and nicknamed by the press ‘the muse of the transition’. Emma remembers her with admiration: ‘She was my first mentor and my first point of reference a female leader’.

‘My aunt, Hortensia Herrero, has created in Valencia an attraction cultural that in a few months has become a reference of our city’.

But Madrid became too small for her. Emma wanted to see the world and at the age of 25 she landed in New York “a fascinating city for a young journalist “. It was also at that time that she met her husband, a descendant of an Ottoman general who was a friend of Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia. By chance, Emma attended a fête where the financier was celebrating his birthday in England: “I saw him and he took my breath away. I fell in love with his lion face. His intellect and his disrespect for social conventions made their engagement inevitable. The couple celebrated three wedding days. The first one started at night in the farmhouse of the Roigs and her father spared no expense. In the end, and after all, his first-born daughter was getting married. It ended with all the fireworks of the city and among the guests appeared Romario, at that time the great signing of Valencia Football Club and one of the best footballers at the time. The ceremony, the next day, was held in a manor house surrounded by orange trees where the guests ate paella and danced in the sun. Missing was the English version. The couple and the bride’s family travelled to London to celebrate their wedding at the Natural History Museum, under the shadow of a huge dinosaur and the watchful eye of the sculpture of naturalist Charles Darwin, one of Emma’s idols. As you can see, nothing in this family is conventional.