In 1921, the first plane piloted by a Spaniard had taken to the air: on the ground, a young Asturian aristocrat, María Bernaldo de Quirós, born in 1898, did not even suspect that 7 years later she would be the first woman to obtain a pilot's license.
She had become interested in aviation by pure chance: married for the second time to the mayor of Ciudad Rodrigo, luck would have it that within a month three planes following the Seville-Valladolid route had to make an emergency landing on a nearby farm. María discovered that nothing, neither social reproach, nor accusations that a married woman should look for nothing among men who flew such machines, nor her husband's opposition, could separate her from that passion.
She was not the only one who tried to pass the qualification in that year of 1928. The country was experiencing a real fever for aerial conquests. Eighteen candidates presented themselves to the tests of the Real Aero Club of Madrid. María, who would soon be nicknamed Miss Swallow, was the only woman. Her beauty, her noble origins, and the bold statements that were reported in the newspapers (“Women are good for more than just embroidery”) guaranteed her ephemeral fame. Every party wanted to have that modern woman, even if she was a bit too modern for the Aero Club itself, which refused her a membership and refused to let her get close to any of its planes. The fact that she defended divorce for women and was one of the first to obtain it (she had left her husband to start a relationship with her flight instructor, the military pilot Díaz de Lecea) did not help her to be seen in a better light.
The only way to get around this prohibition was to get her own plane: she therefore bought a De Havilland plane, her Mosquito, which she financed with promotional trips and baptisms throughout Spain, with which she maintained her star aura. Although she found that men refused to fly with her, many women were eager for their first flight to be piloted by Miss Golondrina.
During the Civil War, like her partner, she supported the Francoist side, for which she made some reconnaissance flights: the Dictatorship annulled the divorce she had obtained, so she could never marry Díaz de Lecea, and also ended her career as a pilot. He, on the other hand, became Minister of the Air Force. María died in 1983. An Iberia Airbus A320Neo named in her honour has remembered her since 2020. Possibly the best tribute she could receive.
