The summer Spain’s Queen Sofía could have married Harald of Norway

In the summer of 1954, Queen Frederica of Greece organized an 11-day cruise through the Aegean Sea for around a hundred European princes and princesses. Officially, the wife of King Paul I of the Hellenes arranged the voyage aboard the luxury yacht Agamemnon to help reopen Greece to tourism after the devastation of the Second World War. Unofficially, Frederica, who shared her great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s talent for matchmaking, conceived the trip as an opportunity for Europe’s future monarchs to meet and, if luck allowed, fall in love.

It was on this cruise that the then Princess Sofía, Frederica’s eldest daughter, first met Spain’s Juan Carlos de Borbón. As both would later recount, there was no spark between them during the Agamemnon voyage. Seven years would pass before they met again, married, and became the king and queen of Spain. Sofía later took the title of queen emerita after Juan Carlos abdicated in 2014 and their son, Felipe VI, ascended the throne.

What did emerge during that August 1954 cruise was a shared ambition between Queen Frederica and Princess Astrid of Norway, daughter of King Olav V. According to contemporary accounts, Astrid, then 22, became determined to engineer a romance between her younger brother, Prince Harald, the future King of Norway, and Sofia of Greece. Frederica, famed for her court intrigues, readily embraced the idea.

The young royals first met in the summer of 1959, when King Paul and Queen Frederica toured Scandinavia by car with their children. Former Queen Sofía later recalled the visit in The Queen, her official biography published by Pilar Urbano in 1996.

“I was about to turn 21. And I had never in my life seen Prince Harald of Norway. Well, the moment we set foot on Norwegian soil, we woke up to Oslo newspapers already treating 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 had not come on the Agamenón cruise. We had never seen each other!” Queen Sofia told Urbano.

According to historian Françoise Laot, author of Juan Carlos y Sofía (Juan Carlos and Sofía), Queen Frederica was determined to “steer her eldest daughter toward a northern monarchy, and the only future king of marriageable age was Harald of Norway.”

Laot recounts how regattas, balls and gatherings of European royalty were organized to give the young royals opportunities to get to know one another. In the summer of 1960, the Greek royal family hosted Harald at Mon Repos, their summer residence on the island of Corfu. The Norwegian heir spent several weeks holidaying with his Glücksburg relatives, both families being descendants of King Christian IX of Denmark and Britain’s Queen Victoria, but the hoped-for romance failed to materialize.

“I know there was interest in marrying us off. Meetings were arranged, people made predictions, the press ran wild, etc., etc., etc. The result of that forced pairing was nil,” Queen Sofia told Urbano.

It was never made clear who rejected whom, but according to royal journalist Jaime Peñafiel, Harald was already in love with another woman: Sonja Haraldsen, a dressmaker and the daughter of merchants with no noble background.

King Olav did not want his son to marry Haraldsen, so attempts to pair him with Sofía continued. The Norwegian king and the Greek queen sent their children to the wedding of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and cousin of the late Elizabeth II, to aristocrat Katharine Worsley in London in the summer of 1961. At one banquet, Harald and Sofía were seated together, and by then many people already regarded them as a couple. Someone within royal circles even leaked that the press would be summoned to the Savoy Hotel for an announcement of their engagement date. Despite all these efforts, however, the Norwegian prince showed little interest in his “Greek cousin.”

“Harald never expressed any interest. And she responded in a very feminine way. He was the one who closed the door. And she, as a slightly spurned woman, turned the key twice. There was never anything at all,” Urbano told EL PAÍS in a telephone conversation. “That she may have liked him? That remains 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 animated. From her gestures, I believed her. She told me it had all been an artifice of the Norwegian and Spanish press and that there had never been anything there. End of story.”

Journalists such as Jaime Peñafiel and Pilar Eyre take a different view. “Harald was Sofia’s great love. The person who was not her great love was King Juan Carlos,” Peñafiel told EL PAÍS. “They had a more or less public relationship. I don’t know whether Frederica protected it or ruined it. It would have been a good marriage.”

“Harald and Sofia became a couple and were close to marrying, no matter how much the queen herself denies it,” Eyre recently told the magazine Lecturas. “It was a proper courtship that left such a bitter aftertaste that she has even chosen to lie about that episode of her life.”

According to Eyre, Harald snubbed Queen Sofía at the Duke of Kent’s wedding. “He didn’t dare sit in the seat assigned to him 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 gangly, fairish young man said to her, ‘Sofi, may I?’ and, without waiting for an answer, sat down beside her,” the journalist recounts.

Another wedding emerged from the Kent wedding, though not the one everyone had expected. That lanky, fair-haired young man was Juan Carlos de Borbón. This time, “Juanito,” as he was then known, hit it off with “Sofi”. Both were staying at Claridge’s Hotel in London and used the occasion to get to know each other better. They went to see Exodus, the Paul Newman film about the founding of the State of Israel; had tea and dinner at the Savoy; shopped incognito around Mayfair; and danced together at a party at Hovingham Hall, the Worsley family’s country estate in North Yorkshire.

“It was then that we began to feel the pull of attraction,” Queen Sofia confessed to Urbano in interviews for the book The Queen.

After the Duke and Duchess of Kent’s wedding, José Ibáñez Martín, Spain’s ambassador to Portugal, sent a report to dictator Francisco Franco detailing aspects of the budding romance between the son of the Count and Countess of Barcelona and the daughter of the King and Queen of Greece.

Just a year later, Juan Carlos and Sofía married in Athens. Harald of Norway, meanwhile, married Sonja Haraldsen in 1969 after a lengthy standoff with his father. The Norwegian heir had publicly declared that he would renounce his claim to the throne if he was not allowed to marry her.

The aborted romance between Sofía and Harald has become one of royal correspondents’ favorite stories, a tale that resurfaced following the death of the Norwegian monarch on August 28. Over the decades, however, the two royals and their families maintained a long and close friendship.

For Queen Sofía, the death of the Norwegian king at the age of 89 marks another personal loss after a series of bereavements in recent years: her brother, King Constantine II of Greece, in January 2023; her cousin and closest friend, Tatiana Radziwill, in December 2025; and her sister and confidante, Irene of Greece, in January this year.

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