Born: 26 October 1908, Spain
Died: 10 June 1993
Country most active: Spain
Also known as: Maria del Pilar Careaga Basabe
The following is republished with permission from Magnificent Women in Engineering and was written by Nina C. Baker.
Maria del Pilar Careaga is considered to have been Spain’s first female industrial engineer, but she also went on to have a significant political career, using her position to advance women’s opportunities, including the first women in Bilbao’s police force.
Born in Madrid, into an aristocratic family, she studied surveying and then completed her studies in industrial engineering at the Technical University of Madrid, becoming the first woman engineer in Spain, in 1929. In her final year she specialised in railway engineering and spent her practical internship as a train driver, becoming the first woman who drove a train in Spain, attracting a lot of media attention.
However, she did not pursue an engineering career but was soon involved in politics, supporting Catholic women’s groups. During the Spanish Civil War she sided with the Franco supporters and was imprisoned until 1936. In 1943, she married Enrique Lequerica Erquiza, also an engineer. In 1958 the Pope granted her the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Cross “in recognition of the services rendered to the Church and to society”, the highest award open to women in the church and the first of many major awards and medals she received.
In 1964 she became the first female elected as a provincial deputy (for Vizcaya County Council, and in 1969 she was elected to be Mayor of Bilbao, the first woman to hold a mayor’s office during the Franco dictatorship. During her 6 years as mayor she oversaw many infrastructural and educational developments, but her alignment with the far right was becoming controversial and in 1979 she had the dubious honour of being the first woman to be shot by ETA (the Basque organisation Euskadi Ta Askatasuna). Although she survived a bullet in her lung, she retired from public life and died of liver complications in 1993.