King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia are dusting off Spain’s crown jewels. In the coming days, the Royal Palace of Madrid will host President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron for a state visit years in the making — one that happens to land just as Infanta Sofía prepares to swap Lisbon for Paris, the very city where the Macrons live and govern.
According to our sister website HOLA! Spain, the visit begins September 17 and runs through September 19, opening with a ceremony in the Plaza de la Armería at the Royal Palace. It’s the kind of occasion that calls for the full jewelry vault to come out of storage.
A visit two decades in the making
The invitation itself is old news; the follow-through is not. Felipe VI first extended a formal invitation to Macron back in 2018, during the French president’s inaugural working visit to Spain. What should have followed relatively quickly instead got tangled up — first in political instability, then the COVID-19 pandemic, then the long legislative slog of ratifying the Spain-France Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation.
Nearly a decade later, the state visit is finally happening, arriving just as Macron’s own political runway grows short: reelected in 2022, he announced last April that he does not intend to seek office again in the 2027 elections. That timing lends the September trip an unmistakable air of closure — a capstone on a diplomatic relationship built on shared borders and, increasingly, shared family ties.
© Corbis via Getty ImagesBecause Macron remains in office until the next election, the symbolism of this visit is layered. It arrives just four days before Infanta Sofía begins the next chapter of her own education: this September 21, she’s set to relocate to Paris to start her second year at Forward College, continuing the political science and international relations degree she began in Lisbon. Her new life will be based at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, a residence hall in the city’s 14th arrondissement that houses more than 12,000 students from some 150 countries.
The move puts Spain’s line of succession closer to the Élysée Palace than it’s ever been, and gives an official state visit between the two countries an unusually personal layer.
What the jewelry box might reveal
© GettyState visits like this one are exactly the occasions the Spanish royal jewelry vault exists for, and this wouldn’t be the first time a French encounter has coincided with a piece of serious royal history making an appearance. When Felipe VI and Letizia traveled to the Élysée Palace in March 2020, Letizia wore the pearl necklace of Isabel II, which is the oldest piece in the Spanish queens’ jewelry collection.
The necklace dates to 1846, when Francisco de Asís de Borbón gave it to his wife, Queen Isabel II; the piece had previously belonged to his own mother. It was later passed to King Alfonso XIII, entering what’s known as the joyero de pasar — the rotating collection of heirloom pieces passed down through the Spanish crown — before eventually reaching Letizia.
A friendship with a long paper trail
This September visit is far from the only chapter in the Bourbon-Macron relationship. Felipe VI and Letizia have crossed paths with the Macrons on French soil more than once: on October 5, 2018, the two couples toured the Grand Palais together for the retrospective “Miró, la couleur de mes rêves”; in 2022, the Macrons were received at the Royal Palace in Madrid for the NATO Summit, an occasion that put Letizia and Brigitte Macron’s evident rapport on display.
Their last meeting took place in 2024, when Spain’s royals joined the French heads of state at the Louvre ahead of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
© Getty ImagesFelipe VI has also made solo trips to France that underscore how settled the relationship between the two countries has become. Most recently, he traveled to Versailles as Macron’s guest to view an exhibition honoring Louis de France. Ot marked a rare moment: a Bourbon monarch inside the palace that once served as the official seat of France’s kings.
Spanish press previously reported that the last Spanish monarch to visit Versailles before Felipe VI was his great-grandfather, Alfonso XIII — though outlets have cited different years for that visit, with some placing it in 1905 and others in 1919.
With Infanta Sofía on the verge of making Paris her home, the visit lands as both a diplomatic formality and something closer to a family occasion, with Spain’s line of succession quite literally packing its bags for France.
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