Painting the Town Orange

The royal couple exchanged vows in the capital's 600-year-old Nieuwe Kerk, a cavernous church beside the royal palace on central Dam square.

The guest list included Spain's Queen Sofia , Queen Noor of Jordan, South Africa's Nelson Mandela , Britain's Prince Charles and politicians and personalities from around the world.

But Maxima's parents were not there. Her father Jorge, agriculture minister during Argentina's 1976-83 military dictatorship when up to 30,000 people vanished or were killed, announced after a furore over his past that he would not attend and his wife would stay away too.

After an outcry in the Netherlands when the engagement was announced in March, the Dutch have warmed to the elegant, energetic Maxima - a former New York investment banker who met the Prince of Orange at a party in Seville.

"I'm Latin and I'll remain Latin. I dance and I'll carry on dancing. I'll keep on singing," she told a television interviewer last week, giggling that when it came to dancing, the hips of her betrothed were "a bit stiff".

Maxima, 30, has acquired Dutch nationality and a sure command of the language, and smiled her way through a gruelling "getting-to-know-you" whistle-stop tour of the Netherlands last year.

TV pictures showed her cycling through pouring rain, sitting in on a school Spanish lesson and visiting a former World War Two transit camp, homeless centres and street markets.