An aristocrat of Granada origins, Zayas was a friend of the Manuel and Antonio Machado brothers and actor Ricardo Calvo and was active in the Modernism against academicism and nineteenth-century rhetoric.
He protested with Valle-Inclán, Villaespesa and many others, over the Nobel awarded to Jose Echegaray and made friends with Juan Valera and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, for whom he wrote a eulogy when he died in 1912.
As a diplomat he lived for some time in Istanbul, a city to which he devoted the memoirs A orillas del Bósforo, Estocolmo, San Petersburgo, Bucarest, Berlín y México (On the banks of the Bosphorus, Stockholm, St Petersburg, Bucharest, Berlin and Mexico).
He was stationed in Buenos Aires in 1926, in February 1927 but had to cease duties suddenly for protesting along with the aviator Ramon Franco for the establishment of a regular airline between France and Argentina, which Spain had long delayed.
From 1907, in a very declared and sharp form, Antonio de Zayas abandoned any modernist fickleness and dedicated himself to defending what he would call the country tradition, with a rhetoric that got increasingly old.