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 Brazilian.[2]
She has three brothers: Ralf (born 1929), Walther, who died in 2020, and Jörg, who died in 2006.[3]
Silvia was four years old when her family moved to Brazil, where she spent her childhood.[4] She studied at Colégio Visconde de Porto Seguro in São Paulo and used to spend holidays in the countryside, among her mother's family in São Manuel.
Silvia often makes low-profile visits to Brazil and still keeps in touch with her relatives. She is known for her love for jabuticaba, a Brazilian native fruit, and keeps a jabuticaba tree in the Royal Palace[5].
When she was 13, the family moved back to Germany, in 1957. 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.[6] She is a trained interpreter and Swedish is her sixth language. Apart from her native German and Portuguese, she also speaks French, Spanish, and English.[2]
During the 1972 Summer Olympics, 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.[7][8][9][10] After the death of King Gustaf VI Adolf on 15 September 1973, Carl XVI Gustaf succeeded to the throne.
He and Sommerlath announced their engagement on 12 March 1976 and were married three months later on 19 June 1976 in Stockholm Cathedral.[11] 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 first time as a tribute to Sweden's future queen.[12]
The King and Queen have three children and nine grandchildren:
In February 2021, Silvia was taken to hospital after she fractured her right wrist in a fall.[13]
Father's Nazi links
In July 2002, the Queen became the subject of international curiosity when an article published in the syndicalist newspaper Arbetaren reported that German state archives recorded that the Queen's father, Walther Sommerlath, joined the Nazi party's foreign wing, the NSDAP/AO, in 1934, when he was living in Brazil and working for a German steel company.[14] In December 2010, Queen Silvia wrote a letter of complaint to Jan Scherman, the CEO of TV4, the network that had aired a documentary about her father's alleged Nazi past.[15]
Queen Silvia commissioned a report from World War II expert Erik Norberg, a choice that was criticised due to Norberg having ties to the royal family. In his report, Norberg said that the Queen's father had in fact helped the owner of the steel-fabrication plant, a Jewish businessperson, escape from Germany by taking over the factory.[16] In a December 2011 interview for Sweden's public service broadcaster Sveriges Television, Silvia called the media's handling of the information about her father "character assassination".[17]
Charity involvement
Queen Silvia visits Gustav Adolfi Gümnaasium in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1992.
She was also a co-founder of the World Childhood Foundation in 1999, having been inspired by her work as Patron of the first World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children held in Stockholm.[19] She has also been involved in the Global Child Forum, which she helped initiate, as a keynote speaker in several forums.[20][21]
Her commitment to the work with dementia and the care of the elderly at the end of life is also well known and respected. On her initiative, Silviahemmet was established in Stockholm. It works to educate hospital personnel in how to work with people suffering from dementia, and also initiates research in the area.[22]
She chairs the Royal Wedding Fund, which supports research in sports and athletics for disabled young people[23] and the Queen Silvia Jubilee Fund for research on children and disability.[23]
Queen Silvia holds honorary positions in the Swedish Amateur Athletic Association, the Children's Cancer Foundation of Sweden and Save the Children Sweden.[23]
In popular culture
In May 2025, Queen Silvia made a surprise appearance on national television in Sweden to honor entertainer-designer Christer Lindarw in a program about Lindarw's life and career.[24]
↑Swedish Royal websiteArchived 23 May 2013 at the Wayback Machine , kungahuset.se; accessed 7 April 2016. (in Swedish) State visit of Grand-Dukes of Luxembourg in Sweden, gala dinner (15 April 2008)
↑Portuguese Presidency Website, Orders search formArchived 17 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine: type "RAINHA SÍLVIA" in "nome", then click "Pesquisar"
↑Portuguese Presidency, King Carl XVI receives the Grand Collar of the Order of Saint James of the Sword and Queen Silvia receives the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry: Photo.
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