Queen Silvia of Sweden

Childhood and parentage[edit]

Silvia Renate Sommerlath was born in Heidelberg, Germany, on 23 December 1943,^[1] the only daughter of Alice (née Soares de Toledo) and Walther Sommerlath. Her father was German and her mother was Brazilian.^[2]


She has one older brother: Ralf Sommerlath (born 1929). Her other brothers were Walther Sommerlath, who died in 2020, and Jörg Sommerlath, who died in 2006. The Mother-Child House Jörg Sommerlath in Berlin, operated by Queen Silvia's World Childhood Foundation,^[3] is named after her brother.


She attended grammar school in Düsseldorf, finishing her Abitur in 1963; and attended the Munich School of Interpreting from 1965 to 1969, majoring in Spanish.^[1]


She has some fluency in Swedish Sign Language, a national sign language used by the deaf community in Sweden.^[4] She is a trained interpreter and Swedish is her sixth language. She speaks her native German, her mother's language of Portuguese, as well as French, Spanish, and English.^[2]

During the 1972 Summer Olympics, Silvia Sommerlath met Crown Prince Carl Gustaf. At the time, she was leading a marketing campaign for the city of Munich. Sommerlath and the other Olympic hostesses wore sky-blue dirndls to promote Bavarian cultural identity.^[5][6][7][8] After the death of King Gustaf VI Adolf on 15 September 1973, Carl XVI Gustaf succeeded to the throne.


He and Silvia announced their engagement on 12 March 1976 and were married three months later, on 19 June 1976 in Stockholm Cathedral ("Storkyrkan Cathedral") in Stockholm.^[9] It was the first marriage of a reigning Swedish monarch since 1797. The wedding was preceded, the evening before, by a Royal Variety Performance, where the Swedish musical group ABBA performed "Dancing Queen" for the very first time, as a tribute to Sweden's future queen.^[10]


The King and Queen of Sweden have three children and eight grandchildren:


In February 2021, Silvia was taken to hospital after she fractured her right wrist in a fall.^[11]