[3] The daughter of King Philip III of Spain and of Margaret of Austria, she was prior to her Imperial marriage considered a possible wife for Charles, Prince of Wales.

Of her seven siblings, only four survived infancy: Anna (later wife of King Louis XIII of France), Philip IV of Spain, Charles (who died young in 1632) and Ferdinand (later Cardinal-Infante and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands).

[citation needed] Maria Anna's parents had a close kinship; her father was her mother's first cousin once removed, and they were related through multiple lines of descent.

In adolescence, she was betrothed to Archduke John-Charles, eldest son and heir of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, and his first wife, Maria Anna of Bavaria.

Despite the desire of the groom for Maria Anna's confessor to be the Jesuit Ambrosio de Peñalosa, the appointment eventually went to Capuchin Diego Quiroga.

For that reason, the party was unable to stop in Bologna, where Cardinal Antonio Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII, was waiting for the infanta to give her the Golden Rose.

On that section of her journey, Maria Anna was accompanied by Roman aristocracy, led by another nephew of Pope Urban VIII, Taddeo Barberini, Prince of Palestrina.

On 26 January 1631, she arrived in Trieste, where she met Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, her future brother-in-law, who would first stand in for his brother at a wedding by proxy and then escort the infanta to Vienna.

[11][12] The very day, Maria Anna was married to King Ferdinand of Hungary and Bohemia per procura, with Archduke Leopold Wilhelm serving as the proxy.

Maria Anna arrived at the Imperial court in Vienna with the Spanish fashion, theatre, dance and music (including the first sounded guitar).

As the wife of the heir, she maintained good relations with all members of her husband's family, but she had a complicated relationship with Ferdinand's stepmother, Empress Dowager Eleonora Gonzaga, mainly because a competition between them began for influence at the Imperial court.

Members of the late empress' household who came with her from Spain, including her confessor and maids of honour, lived at the Imperial court in Vienna for a few more years after her death.

[30] In 1634, the Spanish poet and playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in honour of the victory of the Spaniards and the Austrians over the Swedes in the Battle of Nördlingen, set in Madrid a performance in which Maria Anna, with her husband, was one of the actors.

A portrait of the Infanta Maria Anna, then Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, made by Diego Velázquez, court painter at Madrid, was part of the collection of the Museo del Prado.

[33] Portraits of the Empress made by Frans Luycx (painter at the court in Vienna), Bartolomé González y Serrano, Rodrigo de Villandrando, Justus Sustermans, Juan van der Hamen and other unknown authors are also stored in the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum,[34] Museo del Prado,[35] the gallery of the Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt[36] and the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio.