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- BIOGRAPHY
Estefania was born about 1506, the daughter of the governor of Catalonia, Luis de Requesens, señor de Martorell, and Hipólita Ruiz de Lihori.
In 1524-26 she belonged to a circle of followers of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Barcelona. In 1526 she married Don Juan de Zúñiga Avellaneda, younger son of Don Pedro de Zúñiga y Avellaneda, 2.conde de Miranda del Castañar, and Catalina de Velasco y Mendoza. They had eleven children of whom only their eldest son Luis is recorded with progeny. She lived at the Court from 1534, when her husband was named tutor of the young Philip II, prince of Girona, the son of Emperor Charles V, until the death of her husband in 1546, when she returned to Barcelona.
Deeply religious and close to the Jesuits, she wrote several moral precepts to her son Luis, the future governor of Milan and the Netherlands. With her mother she began a legal proceeding over the countship of Palamós against her first cousin Isabel de Requesens i Enriquez. She won the proceeding, but later gave up her claim. Estefania died in 1549 in Barcelona. She is buried in the crypt of the chapel of the Palacio Real Menor in Barcelona, alongside her husband and several of her sons.
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