Historia de una maestra

About the show

This is the story of Gabriela. A teacher who travels from one rural school to another, spreading her passion for learning; who arrives in Equatorial Guinea, dreams, lives and suffers through the Second Republic, and who ultimately passes the torch to her own daughter. Gabriela confronts a turbulent Spain, imprisoned by a totalitarian regime, during a period spanning from the 1920s to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, with the unwavering conviction that education is a dangerous tool — one capable of winning a war.

And this is also the story of Josefina, the daughter of that teacher, who went on to found the Colegio Estilo in Madrid during the height of the Franco dictatorship. A daughter who not only took up her mother’s legacy but, above all, inherited her belief in the power of education.

It is the story of thousands of children, thousands of teachers, thousands of schools and thousands of books, of a society that mobilised with the aim of emerging from darkness and ignorance in order to be free. But it could just as well be a story of our time—in 2025—when pockets of armed conflict persist and, for some, education remains a real and viable alternative to violence.

Today, the legacy that Gabriela once passed on to Josefina reaches us. Can a country be saved from its classrooms?

Note from the adaptor

Stories tell us different things depending on where and when we hear them. When this story came to me, I felt an enormous sense of responsibility. The story doesn’t come quietly — it arrives with urgency and the need to speak of something we are on the verge of forgetting, but that we still have time to reclaim, to transform our future and imagine it as we truly wish it to be.

Josefina Aldecoa’s mother, a teacher during the Second Republic, once said: “Only through education can a society be transformed”. That phrase echoes throughout the play with a single purpose — to reach you. This story reminds us that there were once those who dreamt of a freer, less oppressive country. From that dream was born the Spanish Second Republic, full of classrooms, books, music, poetry and culture. Then came the revolutions and, ultimately, the Civil War. But in the midst of Franco’s dictatorship, Josefina dared to dream the same dream as her mother and founded a school inspired by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. That school closed in 2019. Now, it is our turn.

I believe the first step towards change is hope. That’s why this text is intended as a hopeful cry — a call to believe once again in the transformative power of education, and to make it a reality regardless of political systems or ideologies. Because education, regardless of the historical moment, stands above all that.

Aurora Parrilla

Director’s note

I believe that culture holds the soul of a people. And I believe that education is the vehicle that makes it possible — that gives it form.

Historia de una maestra speaks to me of the danger of teaching and of our thirst for knowledge. It shows me the world as it is today and points to the future that awaits us.

I think of the Pedagogical Missions during the Spanish Republic and it still feels like a dream that such a thing could have happened. But it did. It was possible. It was real.

In a deeply personal way, Historia de una maestra also places us in the shoes of the pupils of those Republican teachers who once believed in the power of education to transform society, who fought for a public, secular, democratic, defiant and compassionate school system. Or are theatres not, in some way, schools of thought too?

Raquel Alarcón