Placed by her parents in the Cistercian convent at Casbas in 1605 at the tender age of three, Doña Ana Francisca Abarca de Bolea y Mur spent the rest of her 80-plus years in that isolated location in the mountains of Aragón near Huesca. Around the same time, her parents also put Ana's sister Doña Lorenza, then about five, in the nearby convent at Sigena. From the modern perspective these actions might seem heartless—even shocking—and well beyond what one scholar has attributed to “una costumbre monástica de la época.” Nonetheless, although it is tempting to try to find dramatic reasons for what happened to these two little girls, the most likely explanation is a depressingly simple one: their lack of value in a marriage market based upon a traditional dowry system. Doña Ana never left the convent, eventually taking her final vows.

Ana was the last of seven legitimate children—six of them daughters— recognized by her father, Aragonese aristocrat Don Martín Abarca de Bolea, in his last will and testament, dated 1616. Despite his origins in the highest ranks of the Aragonese nobility, Don Martín's fortunes had suffered consider- ably by late in his life. In his will, for instance, he apologizes profusely to his son for the small inheritance he is leaving him. Similarly, his second wife, Doña Ana de Mur, in her own will expresses great concern about the future of her four little daughters, the two youngest of whom were Ana and Lorenza. One can only imagine the enormous problem the family faced in having to find dowries for so many daughters, to the extent that the convent could have seemed to be the only viable solution for the younger ones. Still, it is difficult not to see these two little girls, uprooted from their family when still toddlers, as victims of a system which rewards the eldest children at the expense of all of the others, so that often a handsome dowry was settled on the eldest daughter, leaving the others with only enough to join a religious community: