He played as a defender for Athletic Bilbao and Real Valladolid in the early 1930s,[1][2] but he is best known for his work as a journalist, director of various media outlets, and also a representative in the Francoist Cortes.
[5] In his youth, he played for Amurrio Club in the early 1930s, from where he joined Athletic Bilbao, featuring in only two friendly matches in the 1931–32 season, one as a starter and one as a substitute, but both ending in victories, over Real Betis (5–1) and Castellón (8–0).
[4][6] His first term as president was uneventful, but his second brought dramatic professional moments in which the Press Association had to face problems, such as the closure of the newspaper "Madrid" by the government in 1971, a war for the journalistic profession against the academic authorities who were putting obstacles in the way of the validation of the degrees of the old Official School of Journalism and the years of work for the university degrees awarded by the recently created Faculty of Information Sciences [es], and also the first journalists' strike after the war in defence of professional secrecy (February 1976).
[6] However, during his second term as president, del Álamo achieved his dream of providing Madrid journalists with the decent housing at affordable prices that they had been yearning for years.
[6][4] The operation was, socially, a success, but economically, a fiasco, leaving the APM with a debt of more than one billion pesetas, so in order to mitigate that, he had to sell off its most important and historic asset, its headquarters at the Palacio de la Prensa in Madrid's Callao Square.