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At around three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people began to gather outside Funchal’s Sé Cathedral in Madeira. The ceremony was running slightly late: the bride was missing, the last to arrive, as is customary.
Outside, around two thousand people with their mobile phones held aloft tried to capture the precious moment; many will have managed it, but when they realised that the bride was not Georgina Rodriguez but Nicole, and those who did get into the church saw that it was not Ronaldo standing by the altar but Fábio, they will surely have been left disappointed.
For this expat couple now living in France, it will have been a particularly lively ceremony. “We feel like celebrities,” one of the guests joked to the Diário de Notícias da Madeira (source in Portuguese).
Some people travelled to Madeira especially to attend what would have been the most talked-about wedding of the year, if the rumour spread by the British tabloids had been confirmed.
That was the case for the eldest daughter of Helena Ferro Gouveia, a former journalist and commentator on CNN Portugal, who said her eldest, a “die-hard fan” of Cristiano, travelled specially from Germany to “catch a glimpse of the wedding” of Fábio and Nicole.
For now, however, the details of the nuptials remain nothing more than rumours fuelled by the national and international celebrity press. Imagination is not in short supply, with some outlets even providing details of an entirely fictitious ceremony.
Last week the press was adamant that Cris and Gio were going to get married at the Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra on Saturday, 2 August. This week, The Sun wrote that the ceremony would take place on 8 August at Funchal Cathedral, at 3 pm, and that the reception would be held at the Savoy Palace hotel, having discovered that on that very day the luxury hotel had reserved two floors for a private event.
The pressure from the international media has been so intense that the Funchal diocese decided to publish images of Saturday’s wedding between Fábio and Nicole to help clear the churchyard.
“After a lot of confusion in the street with so many journalists and tourists, we finally managed to close the church and celebrate,” the diocese wrote in a post shared on Facebook.
The rumours keep on gathering strength, especially on social media, where the famous couple has been betrothed time and time again. There are even AI-doctored photos and videos of the ceremony showing star guests such as Yamine Lamal, Mbappé, Messi and Neymar.
But it is also on social media that the rumours lose traction, particularly if you pay attention to the posts from the people closest to Cristiano.
Take his sister, Kátia Aveiro, for example, who this morning posted on Instagram saying that she was in Lisbon and would be staying in the Portuguese capital “for a few more days”. Hard to imagine she would want to miss her brother’s wedding.