Princess Leonor of Spain pays tribute to her grandmother, Queen Sofia, in heirloom earrings at the Princess of Asturias Awards

With every year, Princess Leonor of Spain takes another step towards her royal destiny. The 20-year-old Princess of Asturias, who will one day inherit the throne from her father, King Felipe, has been undergoing military training and has begun studying for her undergraduate degree, but last week she found the prime opportunity to display her regal credentials: hosting the Princess of Asturias Awards in Oviedo.

The future queen was joined by her father, Queen Letizia, and Infanta Sofia at the ceremony at the Teatro Campoamor, where she presented prizes to people and institutions for outstanding contributions in eight categories: Letters, the Arts, Social Sciences, Scientific Research and Technique, Communication and Humanities, Concord, International Co-operation, and Sports. Winners this year included Patti Smith, Studio Ghibli and Leo Messi.

Addressing the audience, Princess Leonor demonstrated her impressive oration skills. ‘Hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that there are things that make sense and are worth defending no matter what,’ she told the crowd: ‘That is why it makes sense to honour these women and these men.’

And the Princess of Asturias found a way to honour another special guest at the awards, her grandmother, Queen Sofia. The young royal wore a pair of ruby earrings (perfectly matched with her maroon dress), from Queen Sofia’s Niarchos parure. The jewels were a wedding gift, presented to Sofia, then a Princess of Greece, when she tied the knot with Prince Juan Carlos of Spain in 1962. Originally a suite of necklaces, which could also be worn as tiaras, the Van Cleef & Arpels set was given to her by shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos; Sofia’s mother, Queen Frederica of Greece, gave her daughter a pair of matching earrings to complete the parure.

Queen Sofia would wear the pieces a number of times in the following decades, from the centenary celebrations of the Greek monarchy in 1963 to the wedding of King Constantine and Princess Anne Marie in 1964 and her daughter Infanta Pilar’s wedding ball in 1967. In a testament to how sentimental the jewels were for the royal, she wore the Niarchos ruby suite to the enthronement mass of her husband, which marked the restoration of the Spanish monarchy following Franco’s dictatorship.

She went on to wear the set at countless state visits and galas throughout her husband’s reign, including the wedding dinner held before her son, now King Felipe, tied the knot with Queen Letizia in 2004. Notably, Queen Sofia has never loaned the parure to her daughter-in-law, nor has she loaned the pieces to her own daughters – making Princess Leonor’s outing in the jewels all the more regal.

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After a French state banquet in 2009, the Niarchos ruby parure went unseen for almost a decade: its next outing would come at the wedding of Crown Prince Hussein and Princess Rajwa of Jordan in 2023. Three years later, the future queen followed in her grandmother’s footsteps by donning the earrings for one of her major solo royal engagements.

From a young age, Princess Leonor has been perfectly prepared for the throne. Her first solo engagement came at the age of just 15, when she visited the Cervantes Institute as part of its 30th anniversary celebrations and presented staff with two books. The first was the copy of the Spanish Constitution – which she read upon her first public speech in 2019 – while the second was Don Quixote by Cervantes, which she read alongside her younger sister, Infanta Sofia, during their video message at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

After this impressive solo debut, Princess Leonor went on to study at UWC Atlantic College, the ‘hippy Hogwarts’ school in Wales that has played host to a rolodex of royals, from King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Princess Raiyah bint Hussein of Jordan to Leonor’s sister Sofia. This year, following a series of intensive training courses in the nation’s armed forces, she began studying political science at the Carlos III University of Madrid.