Born in August 1936, Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo y Maura, succeeded to one of the oldest aristocractic titles in Spain in 1955, becoming the Duchess of medina Sidonia – and simultaneously taking the titles of Duchess of Fernandina, Princess of Montalbán, Marquess of Villafranca del Bierzo and Marquess of los Velez. Thus, Luisa Isabel came from a long and illustrious family of ancestors dating back to 1297 and the first hereditary dukedom granted in Spain as long ago as 1445.
However, she was to give the title a modern twist through her radical and rebellious championing of labourers’ and peasants’ rights during her prolonged confrontation with Franco’s dictatorship. Her exploits earned her the distinctly informal title of the “Red Duchess” – a “courtesy” she never actually accepted.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, her parents – Joaquím Alvarez de Toledo, and Carmen Maura, daughter of the Duke of Maura – fled the family home, the ducal palace of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, near Cádiz, to go into exile in the Portuguese city of Estoril, where Luisa Isabel was born. It was a privileged upbringing in a richly-titled family. Her great-grandfather, Antonia Maura, for example had been prime minister of Spain no less than five times. Another ancestor was commander in chief of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The young Luisa Isabela’s rebellious streak and nascent republicanism began to emerge at an early age. When she was presented as a debutante in Estoril, for example, it was in the company of Doña Pilar de Borbón, the sister of Juan Carlos, the future king of Spain. Luisa Isabela took great delight in teasing the future monarch by addressing him as “Citizen Borbón”. She also flaunted a fervent atheisim, which shocked and infuriated the aristrocratic society of her times.
She was discontented and unfulfilled by a convent education that she complained would fit her only to for the role of society lady and wife. She promptly married at the age of 18, had three children and then ended the marriage five years later.
What followed was essentially her own self-education, which she pursued largely in the extraordinarily extensive library in the family’s palace at Sanlúcar. The library is reputed to be one of the largest collections is Europe and fuelled Luisa Isabela’s fascination with and love for historical research through ancient archives. This early work would in time provide the foundations for a number of controversial books and monographs that she was later to see published, sometimes publishing them herself.
Among these were two titles that set out to show that African or Phoenician traders, or perhaps knights templar, discovered the Americas long before Christopher Columbus did in 1492. Her provocative arguments apeared in 1992 in the books Africa versus América and No fuimos nosotros (“It wasn’t us”). In another monograph, she claimed that the family archives contained documents proving that the grandmother of one of her illigitimate ancestors, Alonso Perez de Guzman, a Spanish hero of the 13th century, famed for his battles against the Moors, was a black woman.
But it will probably be for her direct action in brushes with the forces of law and order during the Franco years that the “Red Duchess” will be best remembered. These took place against a background of her left-leaning writings. A novel titled La Huelga (“The Strike”) in 1967 was about police brutality towards striking vineyard workers. The book was banned, but circulated secretly. It was followed by another entitiled La Cacería (“The Chase”), about the seemingly untrammelled power exercised by landlords over their peasants in Analusia.
In 1967, the Red Duchess led a protest of labourers and peasants who were demanding compensation for the contamination of their smallholdings in Palomares, near Almería on the Costa del Sol. An American airforce plane had accidentally dropped four thermo-nuclear bombs on the area a year earlier. On trial for her part in the demonstrations, she was sentenced to a year in prison and wrote about her experiences there in a book called My Prison, which was published in 1972.
Undeterred, she continued to write about the same topic, drawing on the real-life accounts of some 80 people who were affected by radiation. These testimonies she included in a book entitled La Base, about an American military base in Andalusia, and about the Palomares incident. But she claimed that her protests led to her books for ever being censored by the Franco regime and, rather than face a further term in prison, she exiled herself to the French Basque town of Hasparren. La Base was not in fact published until 2002.
After Franco’s death in 1976, Luisa Isabela deemed it safe to return to Spain, where she was lauded as a symbol of the new age of democracy. But her rebellious ways seemed to make no choice between dictatorship and democracy. Even in the “new” Spain, she was taken into custody for a while and charged with “violence against representatives of law and order”. She received a six-month suspended prison sentence.
Even on her death bed, Luisa Isabel seems determined to cause a rebellious stir. Unconfirmed reports say that just hours before her death she married her long-time secretary, Liliana María Dahlmann.
The passing of the Duchess of Medina Sidonia marks the passing not just of a particularly colourful member of the Spanish aristocracy, but the end of that period of unique transformation of Spain as it emerged from decades of fascist dictatorship into a modern, democratic Europe. Her likes will probably not be seen again.