His Excellency Mr. Fernando Álvarez de Miranda

Awarded Doctor Honoris Causa on October 4, 1999

Biography

Fernando Álvarez de Miranda y Torres

(Santander, January 14, 1924 – Madrid, May 7, 2016)

He was a politician, lawyer, and professor of Procedural Law at the Complutense University of Madrid. A militant supporter of the monarchist and Christian Democratic cause since his youth, he attended the Congress of the European Movement in Munich (derisively dubbed the Munich Conspiracy by the dictatorship) in 1962, an event that led to his deportation to Fuerteventura that same year.

He served as President of the Congress. From 1994 to 1999, he was the Ombudsman of Spain.

Álvarez de Miranda studied Law at the Universities of Madrid and Zaragoza, and European Union Law at the University of Luxembourg. He later became a professor of Procedural Law at the Complutense University of Madrid. A Christian Democrat and monarchist, he was deported to Fuerteventura by the Francoist government for attending the IV Congress of the International European Movement, held in Munich in 1962. He was a member of Juan de Borbón’s Privy Council.

Political Career

During the Spanish Transition, Álvarez de Miranda founded the Christian Democratic Left, a splinter group of the Democratic Left. The party joined with several other Christian Democratic parties to form the Christian Democratic Party, which eventually merged into the Union of the Democratic Centre. Álvarez de Miranda was elected to the Congress of Deputies after the 1977 Spanish general election and served as Speaker of the Congress of Deputies from 1977 to 1979, during the Constituent Legislature, the first after Spain’s transition to democracy.

He also served as Spain’s Ambassador to El Salvador from 1986 to 1989 and as Spain’s Ombudsman from 1994 to 1999.

Fernando Álvarez de Miranda was the nephew of the conservative deputy Ricardo Cortes Villasana, the uncle of the politician and diplomat José María Martín Álvarez de Miranda (PP), and the cousin of Javier Cortes Álvarez de Miranda, the Santander-born archaeologist and philanthropist who discovered the Roman Villa of La Olmeda in Pedrosa de la Vega. He was also a descendant of the Leones (Tusinos) lineage.

His son, Ramón María Álvarez de Miranda García, is also a politician and economist. In 1979, at the age of 24, he became the youngest member of Congress elected in that year’s general election. He joined the Court of Auditors as an official in 1984. He served as a member of the Court from 1991 to 2021, and as its president from July 2012 to July 2018.