Doll owned by Titanic survivor on display in Ayamonte museum

The doll was documented in the memoirs of one of the few survivors, Eva Hart, and was rescued 37 years ago by Abel Federico Nogueiras.

Eva and her mother both escaped the Titanic alive, and the younger woman passed away on Valentine's Day in 1996, aged 91.

She had to leave her much-loved doll behind in her second-class berth when passengers were evacuated from the ship, but it turned up again after a tuna-fisherman working for the family-run company Argenbel found it by accident when she was 72 – a whole 65 years after she had given it up for lost.

Abel Federico died four years before Eva Hart did, and his son contacted collector Teresa Martín who currently has around 300 dolls in her possession, having started amassing them from a very young age.

She had already started up her own small, private doll museum in a garden shed at her home in Ayamonte when she heard about the porcelain creation – of which only the head and neck remains – and began to carry out extensive research.

Sra Martín has not revealed how much she paid for the doll, which the Nogueiras family had always believed must be a worthwhile relic as it was found near the site the Titanic sank in the northern Atlantic, but says her exhaustive studies involved ploughing through documents about girls on board the ship who had dolls with them until this eventually led her to Eva Hart and to analysing the mould used to make the doll.

It only survived the shipwreck because of its being made of porcelain, a sturdy material and of exceptional quality, Sra Martín explains.

After making an undisclosed offer for the doll and signing a contract with the Nogueiras family, she designed a special corner of her museum for it including a rotating platform and a glass case allowing the public to see it from all angles but without touching it and causing potential damage.

She has also added an information board explaining the doll's history and moved her museum into a proper and spacious building instead of the nine-metre-square shed, and has opened it to visitors. One of the few doll museums in Spain, Teresa Martín's includes the very first she was ever given as a present when she was a small child – the one which started her passion for collecting them.

But she stresses that she would be unable to pick a favourite out of the 300-plus she has on display.

“Just as a mother loves all her children equally, I couldn't say any one of them is more special than the others,” Sra Martín admits.