The Queen of Sweden has revealed that the death of her sister-in-law, Princess Birgitta, came as a great shock to her royal family.

Princess Birgitta, who was 87, died on December 4th in Mallorca.

Queen Silvia said she had been speaking to the princess on the day before she died and that her passing had been a surprise.

The Swedish queen also confirmed that Birgitta had had a fall in which she had broken an arm. Queen Silvia said of the loss that it was ”a great sorrow”.

However, as she spoke to Svenskdam on her first appearance since the announcement of Princess Birgitta’s death, she also shared happy memories of her sister-in-law and described her as ”funny – we had so much fun together!”

She also echoed the tribute that her husband, King Carl XVI Gustaf, had paid to his sister, noting that Princess Birgitta was ”a very colourful person…and straightforward…she always said what she thought.”

Princess Birgitta was the second of four daughters of Prince Gustaf Adolf and Princess Sybilla of Sweden. Like her three sisters, she was never in the line of succession as women were barred from the throne until 1980.

The ‘Haga princesses’ as the women were known and their brother, Carl Gustaf, lost their father in 1946 when he was killed in a plane crash. Birgitta spoke of never getting over the death of her father at the age of ten.

The princess was the only one of the four sisters to marry royalty and so the only one to keep her style of HRH. In 1961 she married Prince Johann Georg of Hohenzollern and they had three children together. They separated but never divorced and the prince died in 2016.

Following Birgitta’s death, the King of Sweden had flags flown at half mast at the Haga palace, where Birgitta grew up, and at the Drottningholm Palace.

Princess Birgitta will be buried in Sweden.