In April 2013, at the age of 76, Norway’s King Harald V exchanged the palace for a hammock in the Amazon. For four days, he lived among the Yanomami community of Demini, in Watoriki, near the Venezuelan border. He ate game with beiju, visited the community’s cultivated plots, listened to its elders, and spoke with Davi Kopenawa about the forest and the future of his people. This was neither a state visit nor an exercise in diplomatic protocol. It was the fulfilment of a dream Harald had cherished since childhood: to experience the Amazon and meet its Indigenous peoples. According to the Norwegian Royal House, he was the first foreign head of state to visit Yanomami territory. Before departing, Harald presented Kopenawa with a personal album containing photographs of his life in Norway. In return, he received a traditional bracelet, a symbol of the beauty and strength of a leader. Months later, their encounter acquired a second chapter when Kopenawa was received by the King at the Royal Palace in Oslo. This little-known episode in Harald’s life may be among those that most eloquently reveal the man he was: curious, willing to listen, and prepared to cross not only immense geographical distances, but also the symbolic divides that so often separate a head of state from those who live far beyond the centres of power. Harald V, who died at the age of 89 after 35 years on the throne, will be remembered for guiding the Norwegian monarchy into the modern age without severing its essential sense of continuity—the very quality from which such an institution draws its enduring purpose. His reign was distinguished by a defence of tolerance, a respect for difference, and a form of leadership that seldom needed to raise its voice in order to be heard. His relationship with Brazil, however, began many decades before that journey to the Amazon. In March 1964, while still Crown Prince, Harald visited the country. Four years later, he and Sonja chose Rio de Janeiro as their honeymoon destination. There was a family connection as well: his sister, Princess Ragnhild, lived in Brazil for decades with her husband, the Norwegian businessman Erling Lorentzen, founder of Aracruz Celulose. Thus, when Harald and Sonja returned in 2003 for a state visit, they were hardly arriving on wholly unfamiliar shores. In an address at the Copacabana Palace, the King spoke of the couple’s special affection for Rio and recalled that commercial ties between the two countries stretched back to 1842, when the Norwegian schooner Nordstjernen arrived in the city laden with cod and sailed back to Europe carrying coffee. The 2003 delegation, numbering some 150 people, was at the time the largest and most diverse Norwegian delegation of its kind. In addition to Brasília, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Harald travelled to Jaguariaíva, in the state of Paraná, where a Norwegian company had made one of Norway’s largest investments in Brazil. In his speeches, he emphasised the affinities between the two nations: extensive coastlines, maritime expertise, energy production and considerable experience in offshore exploration. This was more than ceremonial diplomacy. The visit helped give shape to a partnership that would grow into one of considerable economic and strategic importance. Today, more than 230 Norwegian companies have a presence in Brazil, the most important investment market for Norwegian businesses outside Europe and the United States. Energy, oil and gas, shipping, fisheries, technology and the green transition now form part of a bilateral agenda far broader than the trade in cod and coffee with which the relationship began. Yet it was in the Amazon that this relationship acquired its most profound dimension. Since 2008, Brazil and Norway have built one of the world’s most significant international partnerships for forest conservation. Norway became the first and largest donor to the Amazon Fund, contributing more than R$3.8 billion in funds received by May of this year. Administered by Brazil’s development bank, BNDES, the mechanism linked part of that support to Brazil’s success in reducing deforestation—bringing together environmental cooperation, measurable targets and an inherently long-term vision. Harald neither governed Norway nor directly determined its foreign policy. In a constitutional monarchy, that was not his role. Yet a head of state also communicates a nation’s priorities through the places and people to whom he chooses to devote his attention. By spending four days among the Yanomami, Harald gave human expression to the values his country sought to project to the wider world. Two years later, during a visit to Brazil, his son Haakon—now King Haakon VIII—recalled that his father continued to speak fondly of the experience. In another address, he distilled the relationship between the two countries into a sentence that might equally have captured Harald’s own outlook: “We are long-term partners, and we intend to remain so.” That idea may well be the most contemporary aspect of Harald’s legacy. In a political and corporate world increasingly governed by quarterly results, the next election and the demand for instant reaction, Harald embodied the quiet strength of continuity. He understood that trust is built over decades; that institutions preserve their relevance only by evolving; and that tradition need not be synonymous with immobility. It was through Global Dignity, an initiative co-founded by Haakon to place human dignity at the heart of decision-making, that I came to understand more closely the values associated with this family and with Norwegian society. Dignity, in this sense, is no abstraction. It begins with the willingness to see another person, to listen to them, and to recognise that every human life possesses the same intrinsic worth. That is precisely what Harald did in the Amazon. Between Oslo, Rio de Janeiro and Watoriki, his story with Brazil encompassed affection, commerce, environmental stewardship and the defence of human dignity. Norway has lost its king. Brazil has lost an old friend—one of those rare friends who understood early that some of the most consequential alliances are not forged to yield immediate returns, but to withstand the passage of time.
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