Formerly Silvia Sommerlath, Queen Silvia was born on December 23, 1943, in West Germany to a German father and Brazilian mother. Four years later, the family moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil, for her father’s job. They returned to Europe in 1957, where she studied to be an interpreter. In 1972, she got a job as a hostess for the Munich Games—where she met Crown Prince Carl Gustaf. They wed in 1976. (That same year, she also became the Head of Protocol for the 1976 Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria.) She is the founder of the World Childhood Foundation and is a prominent advocate for dementia care.
Crown Princess Victoria
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The first child of Queen Silvia and King Carl Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria originally was not supposed to be the heir apparent to the Swedish throne: traditional laws of male primogeniture made it so her younger brother, Prince Carl, surpassed her in the line of succession after his birth in 1979. However, a constitutional change took place later that year that allowed Victoria to eventually inherit the Swedish Crown.
She studied at Yale University in New Haven and Uppsala University in Sweden, then went on to work at the United Nations for a period. In 2009, she announced her engagement to her personal trainer Daniel Westling. They wed the next year at the Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Stockholm. They have two children, Estelle and Oscar.
Prince Daniel
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