[I used to live in Madrid, Spain, which was where I wrote this.]

Dawn, Saturday, May 22, 2004. Helicopters rumbled over my neighborhood, as they had for days. It was almost time for the wedding between don Felipe de Borbón y Grecia, the Prince of Asturias, heir to the Spanish throne, and doña Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano, a television news anchorwoman. The maximum security skies over Ground Zero in Madrid, Spain, were secure, very secure, a necessary measure because we were about to be “witness to history,” as the Chamber of Commerce posters assured us. I had champagne chilling in the refrigerator. The mayor of Madrid had issued an edict calling on us to “make a special effort, offering maximum participation and a most affectionate attitude so that the celebration will be a success in all its aspects,” and who was I to disobey?

On November 3, 2003, his Highness (1.97 meters / 6.46 feet tall) had announced his engagement to doña Letizia. Furor ensued. He had first noticed her a year earlier while channel surfing; she had won the 2001 Larra Award for best young journalist and was known for a dedication to her work bordering on perfectionism and for icy ambition: a slim woman with an angular but lovely face. With the aid of mutual friends, he began attending the same social event and chatting with her about international politics, a mutual interest. Eventually he escalated to personal phone calls and SMS messages, finally dates.

The Queen had already said that the Prince could marry a plebeian, something many European royal houses endorse these days, and he had begun to realize that supermodels and the like might not be what the Spanish dynasty needed, although fresh blood wouldn’t hurt; the less said about some of his inbred distant predecessors, the better. She was 30 at the time, and divorced, but the Spanish Catholic Church hierarchy determined that since the first wedding had been a civil marriage, not religious, it had merely been fornication, so it could be washed away with confession. Moreover, she was from Oviedo, Asturias, so she would be the first Asturian princess of Asturias in 616 years.

The Prince had pledged that he would only wed for love, and they did seem to be in love, gazing into each others’ eyes on the covers of countless magazines. Don Felipe, 36 years old, was finally getting married.

Specifically, at 11 a.m., the wedding party would leave the Royal Palace, walk down a 204-meter red carpet to Almudena Cathedral and at some point in the ensuing one-and-a-half hour ceremony say “Estoy dispuesto” (“I am willing”), then journey in a motorcade through the streets lined with cheering subjects to Atocha Basilica, three blocks from my house, to deliver the bridal bouquet to Our Lady of Atocha, the heavenly protectress of the royal family.

With less than three hours until the historic moment, I left my apartment to walk around the corner to buy a morning newspaper. Traffic had been blocked off, illegally parked cars towed away, manhole covers welded shut, trash baskets removed — and the streets had been cleaned, graffiti painted over, and flowers planted. Tents for police and emergency medical personnel, and their port-a-potties, had bloomed on the cross-streets. Police in utilitarian or dress uniforms and EMTs in blaze-orange vests killed time by milling around aimlessly.

In all, 23,000 members of the national and municipal police, Guardia Civil, and Royal Guard, some of them brought in from distant cities, were protecting the streets, including 200 “anti-snipers” with Mausers on rooftops, while over our heads, in addition to the noisy helicopters, an AWACS airplane on loan from NATO and a pair of F-18 fighter jets patrolled the skies, and anti-aircraft missiles were poised for launch.

Necessary, I suppose. Two months earlier, on March 11, bombs placed by Al Qaeda on commuter trains had killed 192 people and injured two thousand. A Basque separatist terrorist plot to disrupt the wedding had been dismantled, but there might be others. Not to mention threats from the Informal Anarchist Federation of Europe. The 1,700 wedding guests included members of 40 royal houses, 15 heads of state, national politicians, artists, writers, celebrities, journalists, socialites, hunters, actors, academics, athletes, bullfighters, financiers, business leaders, doña Letizia’s grandparents, and even a few personal friends — although not the bridegroom’s bastard great-uncle or some republicans (anti-monarchists) and communists who had refused to attend. Quite a target.

During the last royal wedding in Spain between Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg in 1906, an anarchist bomb killed twenty people, several horses, and splashed blood on Her Majesty’s wedding dress. It had better not happen again. Madrid, like all of Spain, relies on tourism. The wedding would show the world what a great place it is to visit. The 1956 wedding between Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly renewed that little country’s celebrity. The 1981 wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana resulted in US$480 million in wedding souvenir sales and a 40 percent increase in tourism. Oviedo had already published a pamphlet for tourists, “The Letizia Route,” guiding them to such sites as her former grade school, the church where she was baptized, and the clinic where her mother had worked as a nurse.

Preparations had been underway since November to put the best face possible on the city of Madrid. The mayor brought in a team of Spain’s top decorators and designers, who declared the official wedding colors to be white, ochre, silver, and a range of shades of pink. Under their direction, public flower beds were replanted with 1.2 million flowers, which did look lovely, especially the striking pink tulips donated by Holland and planted on the street in front of the Prado, so striking that citizens began taking flowers as free souvenirs, and the city hired private security guards.

The official logo was a large “M” over “MAYO” over “2004” —  Madrid May 2004 — and banners with the logo in official colors were distributed to hang from balconies and light poles and over tacky billboards. The streets were festooned with ribbon-like metal ornaments, real ribbons, bells, garlands, floral baskets, glittery spheres, giant canvases of art reproductions to hide construction sites, and unmistakably plastic imitation almond trees in bloom. As a special treat for citizens, a colored light show would illuminate historic monuments and buildings on the three nights leading up to the wedding.

Two nights before the wedding, I tried to stroll past the show on my way home from the Madrid science fiction club meeting, encountering 300,000 other people who clogged the streets and sidewalks beyond all ability of the many police to control the situation. I didn’t get to see much. The final night’s show was canceled for safety reasons.

Was all this dramatic and magical, or Las Vegas-style kitsch? Newspaper columnists and ordinary residents wondered aloud. I am originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where we pride ourselves on not being arbiters of style, so I won’t say anything, although I did approve of the police Harley-Davidson motorcycle unit in the royal motorcade.

Likewise I will not comment on the new artwork in the Almudena Cathedral. Although the city’s Cathedral was first proposed by Charles V in 1518 on the site of a mosque, it was ready for dedication only in 1993 and still needs decoration, so the artist Kiko Argüello, founder of the Camino Neocatecumenal movement, was asked to paint seven large panels for the apse in time for the wedding. They portray the mysteries of salvation. Some critics call them an “artistic devastation” or “bizarre neoByzantine pop-art.” The Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando said a professional artist should have been hired. Kiko replied that he had painted them for poor and simple people. I will merely say that the colors are eye-catching.

A Commemorative Boutique dedicated solely to souvenirs of the royal wedding opened around the corner from the cathedral, offering everything from coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and tee-shirts to a copy of the royal engagement ring with zircons or real diamonds, your choice. Every purchase was gift-wrapped, on the theory that no one would buy a gold-embossed souvenir ash tray for personal use. But soon every Madrid souvenir shop carried wedding items, and commemorative thimbles turned out to be the big seller.

A men’s magazine offered commemorative decks of cards featuring caricatures of the main wedding participants. The Royal Mint offered 200-euro commemorative gold proof coins for only 435 euros each. The newlyweds Shrek and Fiona congratulated the Prince and doña Letizia in newspaper ads; Shrek II opened a month later. A humor magazine, Jueves (Thursday), which comes out on Wednesdays, gave subscribers tee-shirts that read, “I wasn’t invited either.” The Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp.

Gifts came from around the world for the couple, including wine, liqueurs, antique books (which the Prince collects), paintings, sculptures, jewelry, charity works executed in their name, trees, dogs, burros, china, flowers, furniture, rugs, grouse, a fighting bull, and a vacation suite on the Queen Mary II. A retired Barcelona gentleman gave them a winning lottery ticket worth 12,000 euros.

Spain’s top chefs, Ferran Adrià  and Juan Mari Arzak, collaborated for the wedding dinner. The Asturian bagpiper José Manuel Fernández Gutiérrez composed a special wedding piece, “May March,” which he and 85 members of the Bagpipe Band of the City of Oviedo would debut at the Palace after the ceremony. The gold-panners of the Navelgas River in Asturias donated the metal for the wedding rings; Navelgas will be the site of the 2005 World Goldpanning Championship.

The couple, in turn, made an exhausting round of official pre-wedding social calls, although they did not bring the traditional basket of eggs to the Sisters of Santa Clara to ask for their help, since the Sisters specialize in procuring good weather for weddings, but the Sisters gladly offered to pray anyway.

Things weren’t looking good, though, on Saturday morning. It had rained hard on Friday night and was sure to rain again, the only question being when. Preparations began regardless. My husband went out for bread and reported that the Oviedo Bagpipe Band, which had lodged in the hotel at the corner, was playing a concert in the street while they waited for buses to take them to the Palace.

A friend arrived who had walked four kilometers across downtown and said he had enjoyed the traffic-free streets so much that he thought it was worth being searched by police three times, then added that street vendors were selling disposable periscopes so people could see over the crowd.

On television — ad-free coverage from 8 a.m to 3:30 p.m. on the Spanish National Television Network with 190 cameras to catch every detail — guests were beginning to arrive at the Cathedral. I believe the women had a secret contest to see who would wear the silliest hat. I vote for Marie-Chantal Miller, daughter-in-law of Constantine of Greece, whose wide-brimmed, fluff-covered straw cartwheel resembled the roof of a thatched hut.

It started to drizzle. Prince Charles of Wales arrived, at the last minute as usual, with his own umbrella. The Spanish royals began their trek across the red carpet from the Palace to the Cathedral, in strict protocol-driven order, and finally Queen Sophia, sporting her usual enchanting smile and a black mantilla, escorting the groom, with footmen holding umbrellas. Only the bride and her attendants were yet to come, when the rain suddenly became a cloudburst.

Fortunately, the royal household owns three Rolls Royce Phantom IV cars, of which only 18 were made, and exclusively for heads of state, which is why the “Spirit of Ecstasy” statuette on the radiator cap is kneeling, rather than poised for flight as she is on a plebeian Rolls. They brought one around to transport doña Letizia across the plaza. The glimpses of the bride smiling and waving in the window evoked shrieks of joy from the crowd.

Her outfit had been one of the big mysteries. A prominent but not-too-daring fashion designer, Manuel Pertegaz, had been chosen for the job. The white silk was woven in secret, and the only clues offered about the design promised “classic” styling and “not excessive cleavage,” although Spain is fond of excessive cleavage. She exited the car in privacy, and then, at last, she began to walk up the aisle on her father’s arm … and doña Letizia looked lovelier than ever, clad in classic princess lines indeed, with an open V neckline, long sleeves, and a 4.5 meter rounded train, edged with rich but restrained embroidery. She wore on her head a platinum and diamond tiara that her soon-to-be mother-in-law had worn at her wedding, and which had been first worn at a royal wedding a century ago.

The five grandchildren of the King and Queen, between 2 and 5 years old, were pages for the wedding and walked ahead of doña Letizia carrying garlands. They had been stuffed into gold lamé historic costumes inspired by Goya paintings that they did not seem to find comfortable, but the boys did enjoy wrestling on the altar steps, brief though the fun was. The less said about the two bridesmaids in similar Goyesque costumes, the better, especially the historic hair nets; the outfits called to mind milkmaids. The Prince wore a military dress uniform.

The orchestra played Bach and Tomás Luis de Victoria, the choir sang Handel and Mozart, and the Archbishop Antonio María Rouco Varela prayed, incited them to procreate and attend Mass, and invoked the local saints of Fernando III, Teresa de Jesús, Isidro, and Maria de la Cabeza, in a generally sober and austere ceremony. We had to turn up the TV to hear the homily over the deluge. A fearsome clap of thunder followed the vows — the first rain on a May 22 in Madrid in more than 20 years, but perhaps symbolic of the fertility of springtime and of the new Princess herself: they plan to have at least two and as many as five children, preferably three.

Finally, fifteen minutes behind schedule, after the wedding kiss (on the cheek!), and after we at home, impatiently, had already opened the champagne and drunk our first toast, the newlyweds left the Cathedral under an arch of the sabers of the Prince’s military school chums, and we left the house to greet them, negotiating the police barricades hung with official wedding banners, where the officers saluted us politely before they asked us to open our raincoats to check for weapons. A volunteer gave me a rain-soaked official commemorative hand fan made of silver fabric with the official logo. Perhaps because of the rain, the streets at our part of the route were not packed — Madrid residents are wimps about rain — so we found an empty spot at a barricade.

Soon enough, the police and Guardia Civil lining the street at attention presented their arms. Drums and bugles sounded from up the street, along with the clop of the hoofs of the mounted lancers. “They’re coming!” people on banner-hung balconies called out. We cheered. The horses and then the glass-roofed Rolls came into view. I waved the sodden fan. The Princess smiled and waved in our direction. She was beautiful. We cheered louder.

Soon afterwards, as we walked back home, the clouds broke and revealed blue a sky.

The price tag for all this is 20 million euros and still counting, but according to a study by the Chamber of Commerce, the marketing value is a billion euros, since 4,878 journalists from 45 countries brought the wedding to 1.2 billion prospective viewers, and Madrid’s government showered the visiting reporters with promotional tourist material. The Royal Mint said the event’s impact “will cross national borders and will awake the interest of a large number of citizens in many countries.” You, as the target market, are best-suited to evaluate that claim.

And what will you remember about Madrid, if anything? The uncharacteristic umbrellas, rain-slicked pavement, and wet gray buildings of the May 22 wedding; or the more typical sunny skies of the March 11 bombing?