Presentation of the first volume of Spanish women to be discovered

Leticia Espinosa de los Monteros, president of the Círculo de Orellana, presented the first volume of Semblanzas Españolas por descubrir at the seminar of the group of research en Historia Reciente (GIHRE) of the University of Navarra. The book gathers twelve short biographies that are the first result of the monthly conferences on Women's History organized by the Círculo de Orellana and the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid.

The Círculo de Orellana was born in 2015 as a non-profit association with the goal to bring together women interested in sharing their experiences and disseminating female talent. In 2020 it was recognized as an entity of public interest and, in alliance with the Cervantes Institute, is the promoter of a lecture series that has reached, for the moment, 52 sessions. These events, which are designed to be informative, seek to put the role of women in public life into perspective. The program has been finding in the history of Spain referents that, for their achievements, dreams and efforts, constitute a model of citizen participation. The result are colloquiums in which coincide, in addition to those interested in a biographical history as rigorous as entertaining, relatives of the women protagonists, who offer their testimony. Professor Pablo Pérez López, who introduced the president of the Círculo de Orellana at seminar of the GIHRE, highlighted the initiative as a step forward in a question that still worries historians: what is the right question to ask in order to know the role of women in history?

This first volume of Españolas por descubrir, which begins a collection, brings together lectures on women such as Catalina de Aragón, Anita Delgado, Lilí Álvarez, Emilia Pardo-Bazán and Gala, at position, respectively, by Almudena de Arteaga, Javier Moro, Antonio Garrigues Walker, Darío Villanueva and Estrella de Diego. Another of the protagonists of this volume is María Luisa Elío from Navarre, presented by Manuel Hidalgo. To her and her husband, Jomi García Ascot, awardNobel Prize winner García Márquez dedicated his famous One Hundred Years of Solitude. In total, together with the profiles of Isabel Barreto (Elvira Roca), Constancia de la Mora (Soledad Fox) and Conchita Montes (Eduardo Torres-Dulce), the book is made up of nine chapters which, in an attempt to go beyond a mere transcription of the lectures, presented in the form of a summary, recommend further reading and even a film.