Isabel Urcuyo
First lady of Nicaragua (1924-2014)
Rosa María Isabel Urcuyo Rodríguez de Somoza (31 July 1924 – 30 August 2014) was a Costa Rican-born diplomat and the First Lady of Nicaragua from 1957 to 1963 as the wife of President Luis Somoza Debayle.
Biography
Rosa María Isabel Urcuyo Rodríguez was born in Costa Rica on 31 July 1924. Her father was Clodomiro Urcuyo Argüello, a wealthy Nicaraguan who owned large areas of land in northern Costa Rica and served as Minister of Education in the government of Juan Bautista Sacasa. Her mother was Costa Rican Amalia Rodríguez. By maternal line, she was descended from the Costa Rican oligarchy. Isabel was the youngest of a family of four children; her siblings were Vicente (a Nicaraguan ambassador to Spain), Clodomiro, and Anita. She studied at the Colegio La Asunción de Managua, where she earned a bachelor's degree in science and literature. She learned English with a private US American tutor.
She married Luis Somoza Debayle on 9 June 1947, who flew to San José to court her, as she spent seasons with relatives there. They had met as neighbors when they were children.
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This entry incorporates text from “Isabel Urcuyo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.