Illustrious Aragonese Women

The greatest pianist from Zaragoza developed an intense music career since her debut at five years old. She always took into account her contemporaries artistic production, coinciding with García Lorca and Pepín Bello in the students’ hall. The long musical evenings at her house attracted a large amount of people.

After having studied schoolteaching, she was the second woman in getting a medicine degree with honours. She centred her activity in helping the less favoured social classes, and, specially, in teaching women about their own sexual education.

Have you ever thought why Zaragoza hosts so many talented classical dancers? From Víctor Ullate and Ana Laguna to Arantxa Argüelles and Gonzalo Portero, they have all attended the dance studio this dancer founded in our city in 1954.

The first Spanish female botanist, she collected and catalogued several species from Aragonese flora, some of them for the first time, being a flower that grows among stones one of them. She was also a poet.

Illustrious writer, translator, and essay writer who centred her career in defending women intellectual, political, and management capacity. She was the first women joining the Aragnoese Economic Society.

Singer and actress. She was the most recognised Spanish artist internationally speaking in the first third of the 20th century. Thanks to her beauty, elegance, and talent she overcame other artists’ ( such as Carlos Gardel and Maurice Chevalier) popularity and financial status.

Writer, teacher, and the first female mayor in the Spanish Republic. Self – taught woman with a fundamental voice in the fight for gender equality and progress. She died executed by the coup lead by Franco.

Soprano singer born in “El Gancho” (neighbourhood in Zaragoza), she performed as the star of the Berlin Opera Theatre during thirty years. Her first performances, after a difficult uprising, were in halls like “Ambos Mundos”, “Oasis” and “Argensola”, where she started building her music career. Pilar Lorengar was the town crier in “las Fiestas del Pilar” (Zaragoza’s main festivities) of 1991.

She carried literacy to thousands of small villages through Pedagogic Missions. She was degraded after the Spanish Civil War. Confined at her house, she wrote the most useful and complete Spanish dictionary.

During the Peninsular War, after the difficulties faced by the combatants due to the upcoming French invasion, she forced the enemy’s withdrawal with a gunshot in the so called “puerta del Portillo” (Portillo’s door) during Zaragoza’s war site. Ever since then, Agustina de Aragón has been regarded as an Aragonese hero.

One of the greatest soprano of her times, she debuted in Naples at 16 years old. She performed in the most famous European and American theatres. Despite that fact, Elvira Hidalgo is now remembered as Maria Callas’ teacher.

Writer who spent most of her life time in Casbas’ (Aragonese village) monastery, where she acquired a profound humanistic education. Ana de Bolea rubbed shoulders with the principal Aragonese scholars of her time, writing poems in the Aragonese old language.

Quoting the famous and creative portraitist: “Painting is my way of life”. She has painted more than four thousand portraits that now hang in palace walls, presidential houses, ministries, institutions, and American and European museums.