PARES | Spanish Archives

Identification

Type:

Person

Preferred form:

Muñoz Roca-Tallada, Carmen (1901-1988)Other forms

Fechas de existencia:

Biarritz (Pirineos Atlánticos, Francia) 1901-06-26 - Madrid (España) 1988-05-04

History:

Spanish writer, translator and intellectual. VIII consort countess of Yebes.

Born in Bitarritz (France) in 1901, and was daughter of the ambassador Cipriano Muñoz Manzano, II count of the Viñaza, and of Concepción Roca-Tallada Castellano and sister of Carlos and Álvaro Muñoz Roca-Tallada. She married Eduardo de Figueroa Alonso-Martínez (18899-1984), VIII count of Yebes, son of the count of Romanones, in 1922, with whom she had two daughters: Mercedes and Carmen, who succeeded the title. Their house received famous people from the generation of the 27, like the poet and playwright Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) or the Argentinian writer Victora Ocampo (1890-1979). Other important figures with whom she was friends were the painter and sculptor Joan Miró (1893-1983), the lawyer and politic José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936) and the poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936).

She was Lady of the Red Cross, member of the Central Committee of the Spanish Red Cross, and treasurer of the Society of Courses and Conferences of the Residency of Students in collaboration with María de Maetzu, director of the Residency of Ladies. It was then when she met the doctor Gregorio Marañón (1887-1960) and the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), who opened her the doors to the reunions of the Revista de Occidente.

During the first days of the Civil War, the countess decided to get out of Spain, but when she tried to cross the Francoist zone to reunite with her husband, she was accused for being Republican and enclosed in the prison of Ondarreta, and then in a convent of San Sebastián. Thanks to some friends who endorsed her, she was set free.

In 1933 she started to write biographies, like Doña María Pacheco, and three years later she translated La Mesta by Julius Klein. She also wrote articles between 1938 and 1949 in the newspaper La Nación (Buenos Aires). Her most succesful work was La condesa-duquesa de Benavente: una vida en unas cartas (1955), which inspired her to make an investigation of the Benavente House in the National Historical Archive between the years 1958 and 1959.

She passed away in Madrid in 1988.

Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Date of the event: 1936 - 1939

Context:

Investigó en el Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) de Madrid entre los años 1958 y 1959 sobre la Casa de Benavente. Adjuntó en su solicitud carta de presentación firmada por Mercedes Gaibrois de Ballesteros. También existen expediente sobre ella en el Archivo de Corona de Aragón (ACA) y Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica.