with her childhood friend Juan Peña, "El Lebrijano," the award which was given to her father. After more than a year of professional inactivity, Rocío re-appeared in December 2005, with a special programme in the Spanish Public Television (TVE) called Rocío, siempre, where she demonstrated her condition. The spectacle, which was filmed in two different sessions included an important part dedicated to the folkloric music and the other to her famous ballads and her other hits. She sang in duet some of the songs with the most famous Spanish singers: Raphael, Mónica Naranjo, Paulina Rubio, David Bisbal, Malú and others. In January 2006, Rocío Jurado was hospitalized in the MD Anderson Hospital in Houston (Texas), for a check-up and to have a small surgery. An allergic reaction to one of the medicines provoked her hospitalization in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) twice, which delayed her return to Spain until March 2006. The same day she returned to Spain, the government gave her an award for her work merits (Medalla al Mérito en el Trabajo), which was announced to her once she landed in Spain. On 1 June 2006, at 4:15 am, Jurado was found dead in her house in La Moraleja, an affluent residential area located in the municipality of Alcobendas, a northern suburb of Madrid. The cause of death was the pancreatic cancer she had been struggling with. Her brother and manager, Amador Mohedano Jurado, announced her death in front of the residence at 6 o’clock in the morning. Her body was transferred to the Centro Cultural de la Villa at Plaza de Colón in central Madrid, where the funeral chapel was visited by over 20,000 individuals. Finally, her body was transferred to Chipiona and buried at the local San José cemetery, where a mausoleum was built in her honour. Private life Rocío was the first to substitute the typical regional costume with formal dresses with an international style, although she never forgot her origins. On 21 May 1976, when she married Spanish boxer Pedro Carrasco at the Sanctuary Virgen de Regla, she wore a traditional costume with a comb and flounces. They only had one daughter, Rocío Carrasco Mohedano. In private, she sometimes recognized that she did not have time to dedicate to her daughter; she had long tours in America and Europe which separated her from her daughter. After she was divorced in July 1989 and after