His first major public role was in the Americas. He arrived in Montevideo in 1810 with Gaspar de Vigodet, serving as his advisor, and gained considerable influence as editor of one of the region's first newspapers, the Gazeta de Montevideo, a weekly publication that defended the unity of Spain and its overseas territories against the centralist and liberal project of Buenos Aires. After the surrender of royalist Montevideo in 1814, he returned to Spain, where he participated in the arrangements for the royal marriages of Ferdinand VII and his brother Carlos María Isidro, the future Carlist pretender.

His commitment to the absolutist cause led him to participate in the attempted absolutist uprising of the night of September 24, 1830, which resulted in his exile to Cádiz and, shortly thereafter, his appointment as Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba on April 24, 1831—an exile disguised as an ecclesiastical promotion.

Once settled in Cuba, around 1838 he became a staunch supporter of Carlism, even serving on the Council of State of the pretender Don Carlos. Isabella II later attempted to win him over with further honors. He was appointed Archbishop of Burgos in 1849 and Primate of Toledo in 1857, and was created a cardinal the following year by Pius IX. Despite these honors from the liberal-Isabelline faction, he continued to support the Carlist uprisings of 1869 and 1870 against the liberal government.

He died in 1872, defending the rights of the Pope and the Church during the Roman Question, as well as the customs of Toledo, until the very end.

His work: *La Gazeta de Montevideo (1810–1814)*, a key piece of royalist propaganda in the Río de la Plata region, and his staunch doctrinal defense of Carlism from the episcopate, even at the highest levels of the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Friar Cirilo Alameda y Brea (1781–1872), a Franciscan friar born in Torrejón de Velasco, Madrid, Spain, had one of the most remarkable careers in the 19th-century Hispanic episcopate. He became Superior of the Franciscan Order between 1816 and 1824 and was named a Grandee of Spain in 1818.