Oviedo woke up on Friday, October 23, to the biggest morning of its year. At the Hotel de la Reconquista, the traditional audiences that open the day of the Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony brought King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, Princess Leonor, the Princess of Asturias, and Infanta Sofia face to face with students, honoured Asturians and, finally, with the eight sets of laureates who will receive Spain’s most international prizes this evening at the Teatro Campoamor, in a ceremony scheduled to begin at 6.30 p.m.
The Royal Household chronicled the morning on its official Instagram account, @casareal.es, where the lead carousel passed 10,800 likes and drew close to a hundred comments within hours among the account’s 1.44 million followers. Its defining image is the group photograph taken before the deep blue backdrop of the Fundacion Princesa de Asturias: Princess Leonor, in a striking pink trouser suit, stands at the centre of the front row, flanked by the laureates of 2026, with Leo Messi visible in the back row and Patti Smith, unmistakable with her silver hair, at the front right.
Students first, then Asturias itself
The order of the morning said a great deal about what these awards are for. The first audience, in the Salon de los Consejos of the Reconquista, belonged not to celebrities but to the winners of the Premios Fin de Grado 2025, the end-of-degree prizes of the University of Oviedo, received by Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofia together. A foundation that spends its week honouring world figures began its biggest day by sitting down with the best students of the local university, in the city where the Princess’s own title comes from.
Next came the honourees of the region itself: the recipients of the Medallas de Asturias and the titles of Hijos Predilectos and Hijos Adoptivos, Asturias’s own distinctions for 2026. Only then, in the emblematic Salon Covadonga, did Princess Leonor greet and hold her meeting with this year’s laureates, who received from her the insignia of the Fundacion Princesa de Asturias, the badge they will wear into tonight’s ceremony.
An honours list that spans the planet
The eight categories, as the Household listed them in its insignia reel, read like a festival programme in themselves. The Arts prize goes to the singer and writer Patti Smith. Literature honours the novelist Julian Barnes. The Social Sciences prize goes to the historian Timothy Garton Ash, and Communication and Humanities to Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation house beloved on every continent. Scientific and Technical Research is shared by David Klenerman, Shankar Balasubramanian and Pascal Mayer. The Sports prize goes to Leo Messi, whose presence in the group photograph, standing quietly in the back row on the left, may be the most talked-about royal picture of the autumn. International Cooperation honours the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Arctic storehouse that guards the world’s crop diversity, and the Concord prize goes to the astronaut Christina Koch.
Read as a whole, the list is a small map of what the Foundation values in 2026: a punk poet and a Japanese animation studio, a footballer and an astronaut, three scientists whose work reads the code of life, and a vault of seeds buried in Arctic ice against a hungrier future. It is hard to think of another European awards line-up that puts Messi and Studio Ghibli in the same family photograph, with a princess in pink holding the centre.
From last night’s hymn to tonight’s ceremony
Friday’s audiences are the hinge of awards week. On Thursday evening the same four royals opened the celebrations with the traditional concert, the Mendelssohn Lobgesang evening we covered in our report on the song of praise that launched awards week. The Spanish court is closing an intensely cultural autumn: in Barcelona last week the King and Queen honoured Isabel Allende at the Premio Planeta, in the night literature took centre stage, and European royal watchers have had a parallel week of ceremony in Oslo, where King Haakon hosted Norway’s Storting dinner at the palace. Oviedo’s contribution to that season is distinctive, though. No other court turns its heir’s name into a week-long festival of learning, and then makes her hand the badges to the winners herself, one audience at a time, before the red carpet even opens.
By the time the doors of the Teatro Campoamor open this evening, the essential work of the day will already have been done in three quiet rooms of a hotel: students encouraged, a region honoured, and eight laureates welcomed, personally, by the Princess whose name their prizes bear.
Photo: @casareal.es
Also published on:
- News Today World – https://newstodayworld.org/breaking-news/2026/10/23/prince-mario-max-schaumburg-lippe-leonor-presents-the-insignia-messi-patti-smith-and-julian-barnes-open-awards-day-with-the-princess-in-oviedo/
- Zeitblatt – https://zeitblatt.com/leonor-presents-the-insignia-messi-patti-smith-and-julian-barnes-open-awards-day-in-oviedo/
- MarioMax Magazine – https://mariomaxmagazine.com/a-princess-and-her-laureates-leonor-in-pink-leads-the-most-star-studded-photogra/
- Schaumburg Post – https://schaumburgpost.com/messi-in-oviedo-patti-smith-studio-ghibli-and-a-princess-in-pink-steal-awards-mo/
- Fashion Weeks – https://fashionweeks.us/the-pink-suit-moment-princess-leonor-rewrites-awards-day-dressing-in-oviedo/
- Revista Minutos – https://revistaminutos.com/leonor-entrega-las-insignias-messi-patti-smith-y-julian-barnes-abren-en-oviedo-e/
- Le Miroir Français – https://lemiroirfrancais.com/leonor-remet-les-insignes-messi-patti-smith-et-julian-barnes-ouvrent-oviedo-la-g/
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