Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi y Montiano

Ignacio's father, Luis Hernando de Larramendi (1882–1957), was a lawyer in Madrid.

His wife and Ignacio's mother, María de Montiano y Uriarte (1886–1976), counted Manuel de Montiano and Agustin de Montiano among her ancestors; the closer ones were less fortunate and partially lived selling off family estates; her father was a Bilbao physician.

Considered the most handsome girl in the city, she was also fanatically Basque.

The couple lived in Madrid at calle Velázquez.

They had 9 children, all brought up in fervently Catholic ambience.

A Carlist activist and unsuccessful candidate to the Cortes, in 1919–1921 he briefly grew to be a political leader of Jaimismo, in the mid-1930s again making it to the party executive and remaining on good terms with the claimant.

Having always displayed a penchant for social issues he passed it later on to his sons; during the Civil War he refused to comply with the Unification Decree and withdrew from politics.

Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi y Montiano (1921–2001) was a Spanish entrepreneur, Carlist militant and author.

Already as a 10-year-old Ignacio was engaged in politics, in 1931 distributing Carlist electoral leaflets of his father; apart from the Requeté episode, during the Civil War he engaged in a Carlist student organization Agrupación Escolar Tradicionalista, mocking himself as president of its Madrid branch on exile.

Having returned to the capital he indeed engaged in local AET organization and emerged as one of its most active leaders.

As Ignacio was initially educated at home, he entered Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Pilar as late as in 1932; he had not completed the curriculum before the Civil War broke out.

At that time the family was at their usual summer holiday location in San Sebastián; Luis Larramendi escaped to the Nationalist zone and returned few weeks later, when the Carlist Requeté seized the city.

Ignacio continued his schooling in the Marianist Colegio de Santa María until obtaining bachillerato in 1937; he then enlisted to an auxiliary Requeté formation in Fuenterrabía, serving as a prison guard.

In July 1938 together with his brother and with hesitant consent of their parents he was accepted at 2.

Compaña de Radio Requeté, but following a conflict with commander of the unit, in early 1939 he moved to Compañia de Tolosa in the Gipuzkoan Tercio San Miguel.

With no major combat the battalion advanced through Catalonia to the French frontier, in late winter shuttled to Extremadura and, again after low-intensity skirmishes, reached the province of Toledo at the moment of final Nationalist victory.

In 1939 Larramendi commenced studying law in Madrid, graduating in 1941; though initially he intended to be a lawyer, in 1944 he was employed at Dirección General de Seguros, a state insurance regulatory body.

Since 1940 he was dating Lourdes Martínez Gutiérrez (1924–2015), granddaughter to general Alfredo Gutiérrez Chaume; her father, "funcionario de Hacienda", died early.

Following demise of Academia in the mid-1940s there were no official or semi-official Carlist structure in Madrid; internal political and dynastical fragmentation contributed to crisis of the movement.

Together with a group of similarly-minded peers, best known of them Rafael Gambra and Francisco Elías de Tejada, he staged minor and semi-private anti-Francoist demonstrations, at one point in 1942 having been detained and placed under security supervision.

Their most notable activity was Academia Vázquez de Mella, a Carlist-flavored private educational initiative of Maximo Palomar; the experience formatted Larramendi reinforcing his penchant for social issues and for cultural rather than political dimension of Traditionalism.

The couple married in 1950 and had 9 children, born between 1951 and 1965.

The best known of them, Ramón Hernando de Larramendi, is widely recognized in Spain as a polar explorer.

Luis succeeded his father in business and in politics, rising to high positions within the Carlist structures and animating a number of Traditionalist activities.

Miguel is known as professor of Arabic studies in Madrid and Margarita as a poet and scholar in linguistics.

During that period Larramendi, influenced by Elías de Tejada and own father, tended to favor Dom Duarte and the Braganzas as most legitimate candidates to the throne, though in the early 1950s he was already converted to supporter of the Borbón-Parmas.

It seems that soon Larramendi's anti-Francoism exceeded that of Fal; in the mid-1950s he was considered member of "duros" or "guipúzcoanos", an internal faction grumbling at official party line as yielding versus Franco; others consider him member of the "intellectuals" faction, also opposed to the "integrist" group of Fal.

As internal crisis climaxed, in the mid-1950s Fal was forced into resignation and Vasco-Navarros suggested that Larramendi be appointed to Secretariado Político, a freshly created body supposed to assist a new leader, José María Valiente.

The plan was to push hard with the royal claim of Don Javier, but it backfired; it turned out that the new party executive was dominated by supporters of replacing intransigence with a collaborationist offer to Franco.

When the new Secretariat addressed Falange with proposal of a joint action, Larramendi resigned.

His career in the executive terminated after just few months.

Larramendi remained active in the Carlist structures and took part in their public initiatives.

Following a brief and moderately successful episode of launching in 1951 an own publishing house, Traditionalist-flavored Editorial Cálamo, in the early 1950s he became known in the movement as a young, vehemently anti-Francoist and dynastically loyal militant.

He was counted among intransigent followers of the official Carlist leader Manuel Fal Conde, so-called Falcondistas, though did not rise to top layers of the movement.

During the first royal presentation of the claimant Don Javier in Barcelona in 1952 he was not listed among those attending, though certainly position of his father, at that time among those co-engineering launch of Don Javier's campaign, helped him enter Carlist ruling circles of the era.

Larramendi was as a longtime head of MAPFRE and is often counted among 100 most influential Spanish businessmen of the 20th century.

He is recognized as sponsor and organizer of multifold initiatives related to Hispanic culture, mostly in Latin America.

He briefly rose to Carlist executive, but is better known as engaged in promotion of Traditionalist heritage.

Hernando's ancestors on both sides were members of Basque nobility.

His paternal grandfather, Mariano Hernando, was an art merchant, but is best known for the Trocadero bullring in Paris.