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The IWC Eternal Wins the Oscar of Watchmaking

The Portugieser Eternal Calendar takes the top prize in Geneva, and with good reason.
June 05, 2025

The wonderfully complicated yet aesthetically crisp IWC Portugieser Eternal took the grand Grand Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. That’s a lot of grands, but then IWC did a fair amount to get this watch out to the world.

For full titles all around, the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar took the “Aiguille d’Or” Grand Prix in Geneva late last year. The GPHG Awards are considered the Oscars of watchmaking, so this is a pretty big deal.

The key word here is eternal. Calendar watches are those that go past just time, and maybe day and date. Simple or triple calendars will have all that and a month indication. But then you need to adjust the date when months have less than 31 days. To handle that, you have annual calendars that only require adjustment once a year, at the end of February. Go a step further and you have perpetual calendars, which, by adding certain gearing or toothing, keep things straight even past four years.

For IWC, eternity is longer than perpetuity, so it created a 400-year gear. This doesn’t just take into account the leap year every four years, it also kind of adjusts for leap year exceptions and skips the appropriate three leap years over the next four centuries.

Gregorian calendars are confusing enough, but IWC chose to go further by shooting for the moon. The “double moon” lunar calendar on the Eternal has a very precise display that will only deviate from the moon’s actual orbit by one day in, they say, theoretically, 45 million years.

The complexity behind the “eternal” piece is astounding, especially since it is still relatively subtle on the wrist unless you know.

Now IWC has some very classically designed calendar watches, and it has also been more daring in some cases. Perhaps you would’ve thought this new would fit best in a completely classic case and model family, especially in the Portugieser line. The treatment of the watch though is fresh and clean, yet still classic enough to be worthy.

The watch is surprisingly readable, with a wide curved expanse of allowing a full view of the white dial. It makes a lot of use of transparent discs on the watch face for the subdials, and this actually makes things look cleaner, while also being more readable. While the look is crisp, the layout of the information will be familiar to watch collectors and IWC fans. They will remember it from the Perpetual Calendars of the wonderfully energetic Kurt Klaus.

The watch is a Portugieser, and it is appropriately large. It is executed in a 44.4 mm platinum case, with double-domed on both front and back. The IWC Calibre 52640 is an
automatic base with Pellaton bidirectional winding and provides seven days of power reserve using two barrels. Given the amount of everything that is going on within the watch, that is amazing.

This article originally appeared in Robb Report Philippines’ Car Issue, April 2025.

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