In the summer of 1954, Federica of Greece organized an 11-day cruise through the Aegean for a hundred European princes. Officially, the consort of Paul I, King of the Hellenes, planned the voyage on the luxurious Agamemnon to open her country’s doors to tourism after the ravages of World War II. Unofficially, Federica, who had the matchmaking soul of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria of England, devised the trip so that the future crowned heads of the Old Continent would meet and, if lucky, fall in love.
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It was on this cruise that then-Princess Sofia, Federica’s eldest daughter, met Juan Carlos of Bourbon. According to both of them years later, there was no chemistry between them during the voyage on the Agamemnon. It would take seven years for them to meet again and fall in love.
What did arise on that cruise in August 1954 was an affinity and coincidence of ambitions between Queen Federica and Astrid of Norway, daughter of King Olav V. According to chronicles of the time, Princess Astrid, 22 years old, was determined to forge a courtship between her younger brother, Prince Harald, future king of the Norwegians — nicknamed “the white sheikh” for his immense fortune — and Sofia of Greece. And Federica, famous for her palace intrigues, supported the idea.
The first meeting between the young princes took place in the summer of 1959. Kings Paul and Federica toured the Scandinavian countries by car with their children. Felipe VI’s own mother recalled this visit in The Queen, her official biography, published by Pilar Urbano in 1996. “I was about to turn twenty-one. And I had never seen Prince Harald of Norway in my life. Well, as soon as we set foot on Norwegian soil, we woke up to the newspapers in Oslo already presenting us as a couple. Incredible! On the front page, a photo of Prince Harald, and a photo of me. And we didn’t know each other! He hadn’t come on the Agamemnon cruise. We had never seen each other!” Queen Sofia explained to Urbano.
According to historian Françoise Laot, author of Juan Carlos and Sofia, Queen Federica was determined to “steer her eldest daughter towards a Northern monarchy and the only future king of age to take a wife is Harald of Norway.” Laot details in her book that regattas, balls, and Gotha meetings were organized so the princes could get to know each other better. In the summer of 1960, the Hellenic monarchs and their daughters hosted Harald at Mon Repos, the Greece family’s summer residence on the island of Corfu. The Nordic heir spent a few weeks vacationing with his Glücksburg cousins — both families descend from Christian IX of Denmark and Victoria of England — but the longed-for romance did not prosper.
“I know there was interest in marrying. Meetings were arranged, speculations were made, a lot of ink was spilled, etc., etc., etc. The result of that forced pairing was zero,” Queen Sofia told Urbano. It was never clarified who rejected whom, but, as royal journalist Jaime Peñafiel recounted, Harald was already in love with another woman: a seamstress named Sonia Haraldsen, daughter of merchants without noble ancestry.
King Olav did not want his son to marry Haraldsen, so attempts continued to unite him with Sofia. The Norwegian monarch and the Greek queen sent their children to the wedding of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and cousin of Elizabeth II, with aristocrat Katharine Worsley, in London in the summer of 1961. At one of the banquets, Harald and Sofia, already considered a couple by all, were seated together. Someone from the royal circle even leaked that the press would be summoned at the Savoy Hotel to announce the date of their engagement. Despite all attempts, the Norwegian prince showed little interest in his “Greek cousin.”
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“Harald never showed anything. And she responded very femininely. He was the one who closed the door. And she, as a somewhat scorned woman, turned the key twice. There was never anything at all,” Urbano says in a phone conversation with EL PAÍS. “That she liked him? That is her secret. When I spoke with the Queen, I believed her when she told me there was nothing. In private, she was very expressive and gestural. By her gestures, I believed her. She told me it had all been an artifice of the Norwegian and Spanish journalists and that there was never anything. End of story.”
Journalists like Jaime Peñafiel or Pilar Eyre maintain that there was something. “Harald was Sofia’s great love. The one who was not her great love is King Juan Carlos,” Peñafiel states in conversation with EL PAÍS. “They had a more or less public relationship. I don’t know if Federica protected it or spoiled it. It would have been a good marriage,” adds the royal expert.
“Harald and Sofia became a couple and were about to marry, no matter how much the queen herself denies it,” Eyre said this Friday in the magazine Lecturas. “It was a full-fledged courtship that, however, left such a bitter taste that she has even chosen to lie about that episode of her life.” According to Eyre, Harald snubbed Felipe VI’s mother at the Duke of Kent’s wedding. “He didn’t dare to sit in his assigned seat next to Sofia, who felt humiliated in front of all the guests… Ashamed, she lowered her eyelids, fanned herself with the hymn book… Until a lanky, half-blond boy said to her: ‘Sofi, may I?’ and without waiting for an answer, sat next to her,” the journalist recounts.
From the Kent wedding came another wedding, but not the one everyone expected. That lanky, half-blond boy was Prince Juan Carlos of Bourbon. This time, Juanito, as he was called, got along with Sofi. They both stayed at the Claridge’s Hotel in the British capital and took advantage of those days to get to know each other better. They went to the cinema together to see Exodus, the film about the founding of the State of Israel starring Paul Newman; had tea and dinner at the Savoy Hotel; shopped incognito in the Mayfair neighborhood; and danced at a party at Hovingham Hall, the Worsley family’s country house in North Yorkshire.
“That was when we began to feel the pull of attraction,” Queen Sofia confessed to Urbano in her interviews for the book The Queen. After the Kent wedding, José Ibáñez Martín, Spain’s ambassador to Portugal, sent a report to dictator Francisco Franco with some details of the budding romance between the son of the Counts of Barcelona and the daughter of the Greek kings. Only a year later, Princes Juan Carlos and Sofia married in Athens. Harald of Norway was able to marry Sonja Haraldsen in 1969 after a long struggle with his father. The Norwegian heir had made public his decision to renounce his rights to the throne if his marriage was not authorized.
The interruptus romance of Sofia and Harald is one of the favorite anecdotes of royal chroniclers, a legend that has been retold after the death of the Norwegian monarch, which occurred this Friday, August 28. Over these decades, there was indeed a long and close friendship between both kings and their families. So the death of the Nordic sovereign at 89 is another blow for Felipe VI’s mother, who in recent years has lost some of her closest people: her brother, King Constantine, in January 2023; her cousin and best friend, Tatiana Radziwill, in December 2025; and her sister and confidante, Irene of Greece, in January of this year.
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