Top 10 Royal Weddings

Taking place on August 25th, 2001 at Oslo Cathedral, this was the first royal wedding in Norway since 1968 – and it carried a lot of controversy. Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby was a former waitress and single mother, who had a past relationship with a convicted drug offender, and there were rumors of her own drug abuse as well. Essentially, Mette-Marit was everything a royalshouldn’t be. The Norwegian people took a while to warm to the idea of “the prince and the party girl,” but their wedding day was a superb occasion nonetheless. After all, she’s known as a “modern day Cinderella” for a reason!

The courtship between Prince Joachim of Denmark and Marie Cavallier first became public knowledge in 2005, when the pair was photographed together on holiday in France. Marie, who is French-born, was then pursuing an international career in finance and advertising, while Prince Joachim was recently divorced from his first wife, Alexandra. Their wedding took place in May 2008, at Møgeltønder Church, before a banquet was held at Schackenborg Castle. It was a great Danish affair, to say the least.

The 1995 union between Prince Pavlos and Marie-Chantal Miller, the London-born daughter of American billionaire Robert Warren Miller, was a truly international affair. Arguably the grandest Greek wedding since that of King Constantine II and Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark in 1964, it brought together the largest gathering of royalty in London since Elizabeth II married Prince Philip – drawing even greater royal attention than Prince Charles and Diana! Reportedly costing around $8 million to stage, it was also a trendsetter, as Pavlos became one of the first European heirs of the time to marry a so-called “commoner.”

The most recent royal wedding to make today’s countdown, when Swedish prince Carl Philip first began dating Sofia Hellqvist, many eyebrows were raised. Sofia was a former glamour model and reality TV personality, who had once famously shared a smooch with porn star Jenna Jameson. However, when she tied the knot with Carl Philip on June 13th 2015, she looked like high society material. The party started the evening before, with a private dinner on the Stockholm island of Skeppsholmen, while festivities on the day itself took place in the Royal Chapel of Stockholm Palace. It was certainly a day to remember!

When these two took the proverbial plunge in 2002, all eyes were on Amsterdam, and the future king of the Netherlands. When Willem-Alexander first met Máxima in Seville in 1999, he reportedly introduced himself as just “Alexander”; so initially, Máxima had no idea who she had just met. Their wedding day had all the grandeur that might be expected, but is also remembered for one especially human moment when the crowd burst into laughter during an ever-so-slightly problematic exchanging of the rings.

In 2004, at the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, Prince Felipe married the then-award winning journalist Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano. Letizia had been a CNN broadcaster, who’d previously reported on the US presidential elections in 2000, the 9/11 terror attacks and the Iraq War. Her engagement Felipe, which included a 16-baguette ring, resulted in the end of Spanish media speculation surrounding the royal heir’s search for a partner. Felipe is now King of Spain, following his father’s abdication in 2014, and one of the world’s youngest reigning monarchs.

Married less than a year after they first met at a dinner party in 1992, the wedding between Prince Abdullah bin Al-Hussein and Rania Al-Yassin was held on June 10th 1993. Rania wore an opulent, custom-made Elie Saab gown when the couple wed at the Royal Palace in Amman. A major event for Jordan, the couple would gain even greater significance in 1999, when Abdullah II ascended the throne following the death of his father, King Hussein. The pair is one of the most publically prominent royalcouples on the planet, with Queen Rania especially establishing herself as a leading political and social influence with her advocacy work.

As an American actress, Grace Kelly scaled the heights of Hollywood, but she swapped cinematic stardom in 1956 to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, in what was then dubbed the “wedding of the century.” The couple first met at the Cannes film festival in 1955, before a fairy-tale romance that had the world captivated. The religious ceremony took place at the St. Nicholas Cathedral, and it’s estimated that over 30 million viewers watched the live TV broadcast of the wedding. The principality’s 2011 celebrations for Prince Albert II and Charlene Lynette Wittstock were spectacular, but Rainier and Grace Kelly’s is surely Monaco’s greatest wedding ever. Not even Hollywood could’ve dreamt up something so spectacular!

No one does a royal wedding quite like the British. When heir to the throne of England, Prince William married Kate Middleton, the whole world watched. The ceremony, which took place at Westminster Abbey, saw over 1 million people line the streets of London, and inspired over 5,000 street parties across the UK. There were around 72 million live streams of the event viewed on YouTube, and British TV ratings drew in over 36 million watchers– not to mention the overall cost of the wedding is estimated to be $34 million. From Kate’s knockout dress to the couple’s iconic kiss, it was a day to remember, and continuation of a family tradition.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

- Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari

- Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Elizabeth Alexandra Mary

- Hussein of Jordan and Lisa Najeeb Halaby

- Prince Félix of Luxembourg and Claire Margareta Lademacher

- Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark and Mary Donaldson

If Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly’s was the “wedding of the century," then Prince Charles and Diana certainly clinched that title in 1981. Theirs is the royal wedding alongside which all others are measured; a story book occasion and a standout moment in modern British history. Taking place in St. Paul’s Cathedral, it was watched by an estimated 750 million people worldwide, with the overall cost of the wedding estimated at $110 million. Diana, with ivory silk and lace dress and 25-foot train, was the archetypal picture of a princess. It was without a doubt the greatest, grandest, most magnificent royal wedding ever witnessed!

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