Concha de Albornoz

Concha de Albornoz (Apr. 29, 1900 Luarca, Asturias - Feb., 1972 (Mexico City) was a Spanish intellectual, an exiliada of the Spanish Civl War, and among those considered to be the earliest part of the modern feminist movement of Spain.

María de la Concepción (Concha) de Albornoz was the daughter of the Spanish writer and Second Republic political statesman Alvaro de Albornoz y Liminiana and his wife Amalia Salas Abella Fuertes. Her primary family (including her brother Álvarito and his wife Maria Araceli) was driven into exile in Mexico in 1939 by the Franco Government of Spain.

In 1918, while studying, she met and became friends with Rosa Chacel. Later, Albornoz married Ángel Segovia Burillo. April 1922, she was a witness at the wedding of Rosa Chacel and the painter Timoteo Perez-Rubio. In 1927, both couples lived in the same building off the plaza Tirso de Molina in Madrid. In 1930, Albornoz stood as the god-mother at the baptism of Carlos Perez Chacel. The summer of 1936, she and her friend, the poet Luis Cernuda, went to Paris to serve as secretaries to her father Álvaro Albornoz y Liminiana who was appointed the Embassador to France for the Second Republic Provisional Government. In 1937, Albornoz and Burillo separated; years later they attained a final legal divorce. (Burillo’s legal representation was Victoria Kent.)

During the following turbulent political years of the Second Republic and the ensuing Civil War, Albornoz lived in Paris and Greece. Chacel joined her in Greece as a fellow guest of Maximo Jose Kahn. The two visited with Nikos Kazantzakis, and eventually took up residency in Greece. Eventually, the entourage of Spanish exilios had to leave Greece; Albornoz went to Ascona (Switzerland) and briefly visited Paris where she was reunited temporarily with Chacel, Chacel’s son Carlos, the Kahns, and the Kazantzakis. In 1939, Albornoz traveled to Cuba (until Dec. 1940). During this short stay she taught Spanish literature at the Escuela Libre de La Havana and there she became friends with Lezama Lima. January 25, 1940 Albornoz and her Spanish-born parents immigrated to Mexico to join Alvaro and his wife, Maria Areceli de la Escosura Beckar. There she became friends with other exilios, among them Ramón Gaya, noted painter from Murcia.

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