Royalty. Queen-consort of Portugal. Born in Krauchenwies, Sigmaringen, on July 15, 1837, Stephanie was the eldest daughter of Karl Anton, Prince of Hohenzollern, head of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and his wife Princess Josephine of Baden. When Stephanie was eleven years old, her father abdicated his rights to the principality in the name of the King of Prussia, and moved with the family to the Jägerhof Palace in Düsseldorf, where she grew up. Stephanie married King Pedro V of Portugal by proxy on April 29, 1858 at St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, where her eldest brother Leopold stood in for the groom. She was then married in person on May 18, 1858 at the Church of St. Dominic in Lisbon. Both bride and groom were a few months short of their 21st birthdays. They spent their honeymoon in Sintra, walking arm in arm through the mountains. Pedro V, in order to impress his consort, spared no expense in decorating Stephanie's apartments, in the Necessidades Palace. He ordered furniture, lamps, carpets and fabrics for upholstery and curtains from Paris. She wrote intimate letters to her mother, in French. In one of them, she criticised Portuguese high society: "The Portuguese have a sense of luxury and pomp, but not dignity". Although she missed the banks of the Rhine and had not liked the heat and aridity of Lisbon, Stephanie wrote that she had enjoyed Sintra and Mafra. The company of her father-in-law, King Fernando II, did not please her. Together with her husband, she founded several hospitals and charities, which gave her a great aura of popularity among Portuguese people from all political and social backgrounds. The pediatric Dona Estefânia Hospital, in Lisbon, was named in her honor and is still functioning today. There were no children from this marriage. Stephanie fell ill with diphtheria after a visit to Vendas Novas and died only a year later in Lisbon, two days after her 22nd birthday, on July 17, 1859. Her last words would have been: "Consolem o meu Pedro" (English: "Comfort my Pedro"). She was interred in the Pantheon of the House of Braganza inside the Monastery of São Vicente de Fora, in Lisbon. Her husband was greatly saddened by her death and fell into a deep depression. He would only outlive her for two years, dying of typhoid fever in 1861, at the age of 24.