Born to María Luisa de Velasco Alfaro and Manuel de Silva Precaute, Josefina de Silva came from a family with a strong literary tradition, especially on her mother's side. Her great-grandmother Rosario Vázquez Angulo (1839–1915) was the first woman to become a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Fine Arts and Noble Arts of
Córdoba. Her maternal grandmother, Concepción Alfaro, was also a poet, and her sister Carmen de Silva Velasco is likewise a writer. She spent the first months of the
Spanish Civil War in Madrid before being evacuated with her family to
Murcia. That experience inspired her autobiographical work
Nosotros los evacuados (
We, the Evacuated, 1976), written from a
child's perspective. The final chapter, describing their return to Madrid packed into a cattle wagon, has been cited by
historians as a vivid and realistic
testimony. In 1950 she began her literary career contributing to two volumes of the
Colección Capricho (E.C.A. editions), dedicated to biographies of famous figures. She participated in volume XI,
Nombres de oro, about actresses Carmen Cobeña,
Adelina Patti, Balbina Valverde,
La Caramba and Loreto Prado. In volume XII, with Mario Montilla and Roberto Mansberger, she co-wrote profiles of
Teresa of Ávila,
Inês de Castro,
George Sand,
Marie Curie, and
Joan of Arc. She married in 1956 and had one son, though the marriage lasted only four years. Devoted to educational writing, she co-authored with her sister Carmen a collection of twenty stories based on spelling rules, published in Mexico. Although she wrote poetry, she never published a poetry collection but sent some of her poems to the
Versos con faldas gatherings. Linked to Medina de Pomar, where she spent her later years, she devoted herself to historical research, particularly on the
House of Velasco and the
Constables of Castile, from whose Riojan branch she descended. She published two studies—
Santa Clara y los Velasco and
La heráldica en Santa Clara—in collaboration with the Friends of Medina de Pomar Association. In 2004 she presented a poetic work,
Romancero de los Velasco, dramatizing the final days of
Philip the Handsome at the
Casa del Cordón in
Burgos. She died in
Medina de Pomar on 13 July 2015. Her research materials on the Velasco family were donated by her son to the Friends of Medina de Pomar Association, and were later included by Alicia Inés Montero Málaga in her 2017
doctoral thesis. == Works ==