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.<\/p>\n
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 Sof\u00eda later recalled the visit in The Queen, her official biography published by Pilar Urbano<\/a> in 1996.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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\u2019t know each other! He had not come on the Agamen\u00f3n cruise. We had never seen each other!\u201d Queen Sofia told Urbano.<\/p>\n According to historian Fran\u00e7oise Laot, author of Juan Carlos y Sof\u00eda (Juan Carlos and Sof\u00eda), Queen Frederica was determined to \u201csteer her eldest daughter toward a northern monarchy, and the only future king of marriageable age was Harald of Norway.\u201d <\/p>\n 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 Gl\u00fccksburg relatives, both families being descendants of King Christian IX of Denmark and Britain\u2019s Queen Victoria<\/a>, but the hoped-for romance failed to materialize.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d Queen Sofia told Urbano. <\/p>\n It was never made clear who rejected whom, but according to royal journalist Jaime Pe\u00f1afiel, Harald was already in love with another woman: Sonja Haraldsen, a dressmaker and the daughter of merchants with no noble background.<\/p>\n King Olav did not want his son to marry Haraldsen, so attempts to pair him with Sof\u00eda 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 Sof\u00eda 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 \u201cGreek cousin.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHarald 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,\u201d Urbano told EL PA\u00cdS in a telephone conversation. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Journalists such as Jaime Pe\u00f1afiel and Pilar Eyre take a different view. \u201cHarald was Sofia\u2019s great love. The person who was not her great love was King Juan Carlos,\u201d Pe\u00f1afiel told EL PA\u00cdS. \u201cThey had a more or less public relationship. I don\u2019t know whether Frederica protected it or ruined it. It would have been a good marriage.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cHarald and Sofia became a couple and were close to marrying, no matter how much the queen herself denies it,\u201d Eyre recently told the magazine Lecturas. \u201cIt was a proper courtship that left such a bitter aftertaste that she has even chosen to lie about that episode of her life.\u201d <\/p>\n According to Eyre, Harald snubbed Queen Sof\u00eda at the Duke of Kent\u2019s wedding. \u201cHe didn\u2019t dare sit in the seat assigned to him next to Sofia, who felt humiliated in front of all the guests\u2026 Ashamed, she lowered her eyelids, fanned herself with the hymn book\u2026 Until a gangly, fairish young man said to her, \u2018Sofi, may I?\u2019 and, without waiting for an answer, sat down beside her,\u201d the journalist recounts.<\/p>\n Another wedding emerged from the Kent wedding, though not the one everyone had expected. That lanky, fair-haired young man was Juan Carlos de Borb\u00f3n. This time, \u201cJuanito,\u201d as he was then known, hit it off with \u201cSofi\u201d. Both were staying at Claridge\u2019s 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\u2019s country estate in North Yorkshire.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was then that we began to feel the pull of attraction,\u201d Queen Sofia confessed to Urbano in interviews for the book The Queen. <\/p>\n After the Duke and Duchess of Kent\u2019s wedding, Jos\u00e9 Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez Mart\u00edn, Spain\u2019s ambassador to Portugal, sent a report to dictator Francisco Franco<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Just a year later, Juan Carlos and Sof\u00eda 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.<\/p>\n The aborted romance between Sof\u00eda and Harald has become one of royal correspondents\u2019 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.<\/p>\n For Queen Sof\u00eda, t<\/a>h<\/a>e death of the Norwegian king at the age of 89<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/BHTYLTSMHJBKZLZGZTHHANLLTA.jpg\")
Sofia of Greece photographs Harald of Norway (wearing a cap) and Constantine of Greece at Skaugum Palace during the Greek royal family’s trip to Norway.NTB \/ Cordon Press (NTB \/ Cordon Press)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/LD66WGMQXVB6NOJJTXOK4XZVVU.jpg\")
Queen Sofia and Harald V of Norway during the King\u2019s Cup sailing regatta in Palma in 2007.Dusko Despotovic (Corbis via Getty Images)<\/p>\n