Crown Princess Victoria

Crown Princess Victoria (born July 14, 1977, Stockholm, Sweden) is the heir apparent to the Swedish throne, the eldest child of King Carl XVI Gustav and Queen Silvia. If crowned, Victoria would become the first reigning queen in the house of Bernadotte, the royal family of Sweden since 1818.

Although Victoria was firstborn, her younger brother, Prince Carl Philip Edmund Bertil, became heir apparent following his birth in 1979. However, a constitutional change that took effect the following year gave precedence to the monarch’s oldest child, male or female, making Victoria the crown princess. On her 18th birthday in 1995, she became eligible to serve as head of state, a milestone marked by a ceremony in the royal palace.

After graduation from secondary school in 1996, Victoria embarked on a long and wide-ranging program of higher education and work experience to prepare for her future responsibilities. In 1996–97 she studied French at Université Catholique de l’Ouest in Angers, France, and later that decade she studied political science and history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She then was employed at the United Nations in New York City and at her country’s embassy in Washington, D.C. She also worked in offices of the Swedish government in several other countries, studied at the Swedish National Defence College (now Swedish Defence University) in Stockholm, and completed military basic training at SWEDINT, the Swedish Armed Forces International Centre. In 2006 she took diplomatic training at the Swedish foreign ministry.

On February 24, 2009, Victoria announced her engagement to Daniel Westling, her personal trainer and an entrepreneur in the fitness industry. The wedding took place in the Storkyrkan, or Cathedral of St. Nicholas, in Stockholm on June 19, 2010. Their daughter, Princess Estelle, was born on February 23, 2012, and their son, Prince Oscar, was born on March 2, 2016.