Thousands of Cristiano Ronaldo supporters mobbed an unsuspecting bride at her wedding outside Funchal Cathedral on Saturday.
Rumours suggesting that Ronaldo was getting married to Georgina Rodriguez in Madeira this weekend were wide of the mark as Funchal city centre was swarming with people hoping to catch a glimpse of what would have been one of the biggest celebrity weddings of the year.
However, it turned out that the wedding at Funchal Cathedral was booked for Fabio Ramos and Fatima Nicole Cunha Teixeira, a couple who live in France but returned to their homeland to get married and have absolutely no connection with Portugal’s and Real Madrid’s all-time leading goalscorer.
Father Marcos Goncalves, the parish priest of the cathedral who married the couple, said: ‘I can tell you that they are nothing to do with Cristiano Ronaldo. This is the only wedding taking place here today.’
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Ronaldo’s older sister, Elma Aveiro, responded to footage of the large crowd outside the cathedral with a message on social media which read: ‘But why do these people think Ronaldo would get married, when he himself never announced it, anyway? Don’t they realise that the media doesn’t know anything, they just want to know?! And then they invent things. Surreal.’
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Large crowds had also gathered outside the Savoy Palace, a luxury five-star hotel in Funchal, after rumours suggested that it would be the venue for Ronaldo’s wedding party.
After the ceremony, Funchal Cathedral posted a picture of the happy couple with the message on its Facebook page: ‘We never saw anything like this here at the cathedral. It was very complicated for the bride to enter the church to get married.
‘Congratulations to the couple Nicole and Fabio. After a lot of confusion on the street with so many journalists and tourists, we finally managed to close the church and celebrate.’
Ronaldo, meanwhile, appeared to see the funny side to the confusion as he responded to Jornal da Madeira’s post of the crowds outside the cathedral with several laughing face emojis.
One member of the wedding party said: ‘Fabio is not Cristiano Ronaldo. This is all crazy. We did not expect anything like this.
‘I don’t think he is going to forget his wedding.’
The grey Rolls-Royce transporting Nicole to her wedding struggled to get to the cathedral due to the unusually large crowd outside.
As it arrived, hundreds of fans swarmed the car as they tried to get a glimpse of the bride they believed was Georgina.
