First same-sex marriage in Spain

[1] Two women, Marcela Gracia Ibeas and Elisa Sánchez Loriga, attempted to get married in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain).

Marcela's parents, seeing that the friendship was growing beyond what was socially permitted and fearing a possible scandal, sent their daughter to Madrid.

[1] Considering this last circumstance, Father Víctor Cortiella, parish priest of San Jorge, baptized Mario on 26 May 1901 (furthermore, he received first communion), and subsequently married the couple on 8 June 1901 after the publication of the banns.

[2] The marriage ceremony was short; the sponsors bore witness to its validity; and the couple passed the night of the wedding in the boarding house Corcubión, on the street of San Andrés.

[4] The couple were exposed by Galician and Madrid newspapers and, as a consequence of this, both quickly lost their jobs, were excommunicated, and were issued an arrest warrant.

[4] It appears that, so that the excommunication could take place, the parish priest requested a doctor examine Mario to check if he was a man or a woman.

[4] The last that is known of them is that they managed to board a ship destined for South America (possibly Argentina, as so many other Spaniards of the era),[4] where they spent their honeymoon and, finally, stayed to live.

Several years later, some residents of Dumbría spread a rumour about the death of Elisa and the subsequent marriage of Marcela to a man.

After they landed in Buenos Aires, Elisa (under the alias of Maria) married Christian Jensen, a wealthy immigrant from Denmark 24 years her senior, in 1903.

[1] Isaías Lafuente [es] (editor in chief of Cadena SER), in his book Agrupémonos todas, looks at the highlights of feminism in the twentieth century and indicates the story of Marcela and Elisa as one of the most significant events related to the movement occurring in Galicia (another is the figure of Emilia Pardo Bazán).

[14] In 1902 the book La sed de amar, by the Extremaduran writer Felipe Trigo, was published in Spain.

Nowadays this event is considered one of the oldest precursors to same-sex marriage between two consenting people of the same gender in Spain.

In the Middle Ages, a same-sex marriage between the two men Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz in the Galician municipality of Rairiz de Veiga was recorded on 16 April 1061.