Pedro Poveda Castroverde was born to a small Andalusian merchant family at Linares, ordained priest in 1897 at twenty-three, and was assigned to the diocesan seminary of Guadix as professor of theology. From 1902 he established at the Cueva de Guadix — the famous cave-dwelling area of the Andalusian poor outside Guadix — a series of free schools for the cave-dwelling families of one of the most destitute communities in early-20th-century Spain. The Cueva schools drew widespread Spanish Catholic attention.
From 1906 he was transferred to Covadonga in Asturias and from there to Jaén as canon of the Asturian basilica. In 1911, while at Covadonga, he founded what became the Teresian Association (Institución Teresiana) — a Catholic women's institute (technically a 'pious union' under contemporary canon law, formally consecrated as a secular institute only after Pius XII's 1947 constitution Provida Mater) specifically dedicated to the catechetical and intellectual formation of lay Catholic women working professionally in the educational and academic life of contemporary Spain. The Teresian Association rejected the religious habit and the cloister; its members made private vows but lived and worked among ordinary university and primary-school teachers, integrating their Catholic identity with their professional roles. The model was revolutionary in early-20th-century Spanish Catholic terms and became influential for the 20th-century Catholic secular-institute movement.
He moved to Madrid in 1921 as chaplain of the Royal Palace and continued directing the Teresian Association through the long Spanish 1920s and the catastrophic political collapse of the early 1930s. When the Spanish Civil War broke out on July 17, 1936, anti-clerical militias systematically arrested and executed Catholic clergy across Republican-controlled Spain. Pedro Poveda was arrested at his Madrid residence on July 27, 1936, and shot at the Almudena Cemetery wall in Madrid on July 28, 1936 at sixty-one. He is one of approximately 6,800 Catholic priests, religious, and laypeople killed in the 1936 Spanish anti-clerical persecutions — the worst single anti-Catholic persecution of the 20th century. Canonized 2003.