On the morning of the 31st of May, 1906, a 20-year-old British princess climbed into the mahogany state coach in Madrid, wearing a white brocade gown and Alfonso XIII’s wedding gift, a platinum tiara blazing with more than 500 diamonds. By the time she reached the Royal Palace, the gown was soaked in the blood of the guard who had died riding beside her.
An anarchist had thrown a bomb from a fourth-floor balcony. 24 people were killed. Ena, that was what her family called her, appeared on the palace balcony anyway, still wearing every jewel. That was how her story in Spain began. What she built over the next 60 years, through a difficult marriage, two hemophiliac sons who died young, civil war, exile, and finally a quiet death in a Swiss villa, is one of the most remarkable jewelry collections of the 20th century.
And some of it you can still see today on the neck of the current Queen of Spain. Welcome to Jewelry Pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. If you’re new to the channel and you love the stories behind royal jewels, please subscribe and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode.
Today we’re going inside the collection of a woman who spent 38 years as Queen of Spain and 38 more years as an exile in Lausanne, and who even then never stopped thinking about what would happen to her diamonds. La Buena, the fleur de lis tiara. Alfonso the 13th gave a lot of jewelry on his wedding day.
We’ll get to some of those pieces shortly, but his principal gift, the one that was considered the main present, was a tiara commissioned from Ansorena, the Madrid court jeweler that had held a royal warrant since 1860. The brief was simple, make something grand enough for a queen consort’s entrance into Spain. What came back was a tiara set in platinum with more than 500 diamonds arranged into three enormous fleur-de-lis rising from a base of scrolls and leaves.
No colored stones, no pearls, just the cold concentrated light of white diamonds in platinum. A very Edwardian choice and one that announced clearly enough what kind of queen this British princess intended to be. Within the family, it was nicknamed La Buena, the good one. The name came later from her daughter-in-law Maria de las Mercedes, Countess of Barcelona, who seems to have coined it to distinguish the tiara from everything else in the collection.
In 1910, 4 years after the wedding, Ansorena remodeled it. The original design had been constructed as a closed crown-like coronet. The remade version opened into a proper tiara, wearable lower on the brow with the central fleur-de-lis detachable as a brooch. It was a very Ena decision, always thinking about convertibility, always getting more use from a piece.
She wore it at her first official photograph as Queen of Spain. She wore it at the Claridge’s celebrations for the wedding of Elizabeth and Philip in 1947, by which point she’d been in exile for 16 years. In June 1953, she loaned it to her daughter-in-law Maria de las Mercedes for the coronation of Elizabeth II in London.
Maria had put on her own smaller tiara for the occasion, and Ena said to her firmly, “No. You have to wear the one with the fleur-de-lis.” The last time Ena herself wore La Buena was at a pre-wedding gala in Estoril in 1967, two years before her death. Today, it’s the centerpiece of what are called the Joyas de Pasar, the eight pieces Ena designated in her 1963 last will as the de facto crown jewels of Spain.
The name itself means jewels to pass on. From December 2025 through April 2026, it was the single piece displayed in the first major museum retrospective devoted to Queen Ena at the Royal Collections Gallery in Madrid. It is reserved, eventually, for Princess Leonor, who will be the first queen regnant to wear it since Isabel II was deposed in 1868.
The diamond riviere, the necklace that grew with a marriage. Among the other wedding gifts Alfonso presented in 1906 was a diamond riviere necklace, 30 brilliant cut collets set in platinum in a Russian style claw setting. Elegant, substantial, then Alfonso started adding to it. Every Christmas, Alfonso gave Ena two more collets, then extras on birthdays, on their wedding anniversary, on her saint’s day.
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The necklace grew steadily, stone by stone, across the span of their marriage. A marriage that became, by most accounts, deeply unhappy. Alfonso took mistresses openly. He blamed Ena when their two younger sons inherited her family’s hemophilia and both died young. One at 31, one at 19, from bleeding that couldn’t be stopped after minor accidents.
The affection that had driven the Christmas collet tradition didn’t disappear overnight, but it calcified into duty. By their silver wedding in 1931, the year they were driven into exile and the marriage effectively dissolved, the necklace had grown to roughly 100 collets. Ena habitually wore it split into two long sautoirs, 38 stones on one, 27 on the other.
One biographer records that even when she wasn’t wearing it, she held it, twisted it between her fingers, held it up to the light. The observation reads less like vanity than like someone anchoring herself to something solid. Queen Letizia wore it at the enthronement of Emperor Naruhito in Tokyo in 2019, with additional collets adapted into a bracelet so the full length could be worn around the neck.
A necklace that started at 30 stones in 1906 and is still in active royal use in 2026. No other piece in the collection has a longer continuous life. The Cartier Pearl and Diamond Tiara. The story of the Cartier Pearl Tiara begins with a different tiara entirely. One that Queen Mother Maria Christina gave Ena on her wedding day.
>> [music] >> Maria Christina had not wanted an English Protestant bride for her son. She’d hoped for a Habsburg. The gift she gave Ena at the wedding reflected this. A tall Louis XVI inspired and serene piece. Very high, very formal, set with eight oriental pearls. It was chosen from dismantled pieces, cufflinks and buttons from Maria Christina’s own collection.
Correct, expensive, slightly pointed in its execution. Ena kept it for about 15 years. Then in the early 1920s, she took it to Cartier and had it dismantled. What came back was entirely different. A low, horizontal garland tiara in platinum with six leafy scroll elements, each centered by a large button pearl, and a seventh pearl rising at the apex.
The design was interchangeable. The eight button pearls could be swapped out for eight emeralds cut from the cache of Colombian stones that her godmother Empress Eugenie had left her in 1920. The emerald version, combined with Eugenie’s emerald necklace, became one of the most photographed looks of Ena’s exile.
Life magazine photographed it at Claridge’s in London in 1947. Nina Leen photographed it again at her Swiss villa in 1956. Both sessions were done deliberately. A displaced queen, long forgotten by European headlines, showing that she had lost neither her jewels nor her composure. After Ena’s death in 1969, the tiara went to her younger daughter, Infanta Maria Christina.
In the early 1980s, the Infanta offered her most important pieces to King Juan Carlos. He bought the pearl tiara for Queen Sophia, who wore it for decades, most memorably at the wedding of Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark in 2004. Queen Letizia debuted it at a state banquet in Madrid in 2018 when the president of Portugal visited Spain.
She wore it again at the German state banquet in November 2025. Cartier built it from another tiara’s bones, and it’s still going. The turquoise parure and the Chaumet tiara. When King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra gave Ena a turquoise and diamond necklace and earrings for her wedding, a gift from her uncle and aunt, Alfonso followed their lead and commissioned Ansorena to build the rest, a closed turquoise and diamond coronet with cabochon turquoises set in a scrolling base. The Spanish press wrote that the
blue stones harmonized with the blonde beauty of the sovereign. Ena wore it the evening after the wedding at a gala at the Teatro Real. It became one of her most distinctive early pieces, very Edwardian, very structured, the kind of diadem that photographs like a crown. By 1930, she considered it dated, so she sent it to Chaumet in Paris.
Chaumet dismantled the Ansorena Tiara completely and rebuilt it in Art Deco style. Seven stylized fleur-de-lis interlaced with ribbons in platinum. Chaumet kept the design maquette in their Salon des diadèmes on Place Vendôme. It’s still there. The leftover turquoises that didn’t make it into the new design was sent to Cartier who made them into a bracelet.
Ena never wore the Chaumet Tiara at a Spanish court appearance. The Second Republic was proclaimed in April 1931 before the tiara had its debut. She took it into exile and kept it. Infanta Maria Christina had already worn it at the 1962 wedding ball for Juan Carlos and Sofia in Athens. The first time the tiara had appeared at a royal event since the Republic was proclaimed.
When Ena died in 1969, the Chaumet Tiara was among the pieces she formally inherited. In November 1984, the Countess of Morana Santona consigned it to Christie’s Geneva where it sold for $85,000. By the time of sale, the original turquoises had faded and been replaced with diamonds. The buyer was described as an international jewel collector of royal origin.
It hasn’t been seen publicly since. Empress Eugenie’s emeralds. In 1920, when Empress Eugenie of the French died in Madrid at the age of 94, she left her goddaughter a fan in a fan-shaped case. Under the fan were nine rectangular Colombian emeralds. Together, they weighed approximately 196 carats, all of them from the Muzo mines, the stones with the richest green.
Family tradition holds they were concealed in the fan case specifically to avoid customs duties. Whether that’s true or not, Ena received one of the finest private emerald collections in Europe tucked inside a decorative accessory. She had the Spanish house Sons mount them first into a long geometric necklace, which she also wore as a bandeau.
The Philip de László portrait of around 1920 shows her with it. Then Cartier redesigned the whole ensemble, a long sautoir incorporating the emeralds and the Andean emerald cross, which had also come from Eugenie, with two of the individual stones set aside. One of 18 carats into a clip brooch with 84 brilliant cut diamonds, and one of 16 carats into a ring.
Then came exile and the slow necessity of selling. In 1937, she sold the 45-carat Andean emerald cross to Cartier. In 1961, specifically to raise money for the upcoming wedding of her grandson Juan Carlos to Princess Sophie of Greece, she consigned the emerald necklace, the brooch, and the ring to the Stuker auction house in Bern.
Cartier bought the necklace. Some of the stones eventually reached Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and were worn by Empress Farah Pahlavi on her state visits in 1961 and 1962. Other stones went to Harry Winston. The brooch and ring were remounted by a Geneva jeweler. Where the Iranian pieces are now, after the 1979 revolution, is anyone’s guess.
One account reports an emerald necklace matching the description appearing on a Madame Chagoury in Beirut. A separate small emerald parure, a brooch and earrings unconnected to Genie’s cash, Aina kept until the end of her life. She wore the brooch at Princess Alexandra of Kent’s 1963 wedding. It passed to Infanta Beatrice on Aina’s death.
The conch pearl bracelet, Queen Victoria’s pearls, remade. This one starts with Queen Victoria. In 1885, Victoria gave her youngest daughter Princess Beatrice a wedding gift, a suite of pink pearls and diamonds, a necklace and earrings and brooch. Pink pearls are natural, extremely rare, and the color fades.
These were particularly fine specimens, personally chosen by the Queen herself. Beatrice gave the suite to her daughter Aina on the occasion of her marriage. Aina wore it for some years, then at some point marked the pieces in her inventory with an X, a notation for pieces to be dismantled. What she had Cartier build from the stones was unlike anything else in her collection, a vine and fruit bracelet in the tutti frutti style, combining the pink pearls with black enamel and diamonds.
It’s the only known Cartier tutti frutti piece built around conch pearls, and it had a logic to it. Aina grew up at Kensington Palace and Windsor. She knew these pearls were her grandmother’s, and she transformed them into something that was unmistakably hers. The bracelet descended within the Spanish royal family until the 14th of November, 2012, when it came up at Sotheby’s Geneva.
The estimate was $800,000 to $1.4 million. It sold for approximately $3.5 million, a record for a Cartier piece at auction at that time. The buyer has not been identified. The Joyas de Pasar, the will from Lausanne. In 1963, Ena was 75 years old. She had been in exile for 32 years. She had outlived her husband, two of her sons, and any real expectation of returning to Spain.
She was living at her villa in Lausanne, and she had no certainty that the Spanish monarchy would ever be restored. That year, she sat down and wrote her will. She identified eight pieces and specified that she held them only in usufruct, the right to enjoy them, not to sell or dismantle them. When she died, they would go to her son Juan, Count of Barcelona, begging him to pass them to her grandson Juan Carlos.
Together, these eight pieces were to function as the jewelry of the Queen of Spain, for whichever queen that turned out to be. The eight pieces were La Buena, the long diamond riviere, the 37 large pearl necklace that Alfonso the 13th had originally repurchased from the estate of Queen Isabel II, a four-strand pearl necklace, the diamond cluster earrings he had given her on their wedding day, two brooches, And the pair of diamond bracelets she had had Bulgari make by dismantling a Cartier engagement bandeau from 1906.
Her daughter-in-law Maria de las Mercedes gave them the name they carry today, Joyas de Pasar, jewels to pass on. Ena died on the 15th of April 1969 at Villa Vie Fontaine. The eight pieces went to Don Juan. He transferred them to Juan Carlos at the King’s proclamation in 1975. Queen Sofia, in deliberate caution during Spain’s constitutional transition, waited until 1978 before she began wearing them in public.
Not La Buena, not the riviere, but something smaller, feeling out the political moment. Queen Letizia received them on Juan Carlos’ abdication in 2014. She wears them on the most significant occasions. The Argentine state banquet, [music] the Japanese enthronement, the German state dinner. A woman who died in Swiss exile, who had been away from Spain for longer than she had ever lived there, who had no guarantee the dynasty she was protecting would ever exist again, wrote a will that is still the legal and practical
foundation of the working crown jewels of Spain in 2026. You could call it foresight. It might also just be stubbornness.
