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María Dorotea de Chopitea y de Villota was born on 4 June 1816 in Santiago, Chile. Her father, Pedro Nicolás de Chopitea, was a Spanish merchant from Portugalete in Biscay, and her mother, Isabel de Villota, belonged to a Chilean family. She was raised as a Catholic in a merchant household during the Chilean wars of independence. On 20 April 1834, still in Santiago, she married José María Serra y Muñoz, a Catalan merchant who had gone to South America on business. The marriage linked a Chilean-Spanish family with the commercial world of Barcelona, and the couple later transferred their household to Catalonia, where Serra's enterprises flourished.

Once established in Barcelona, Dorotea de Chopitea combined the duties of a bourgeois wife and mother with an expanding program of Catholic philanthropy. She and her husband had six daughters. Drawing on the family's wealth, she became a leading patron of schools, hospitals, parishes, and religious houses in a city undergoing rapid industrial growth and receiving large numbers of poor migrants. She favored works that combined education of the young, care of the sick, and the planting of new churches in working-class districts. Among the congregations she assisted were the Salesians of Saint John Bosco, the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, Jesuit houses, and various communities of teaching sisters. Contemporary accounts describe her as personally involved in almsgiving as well as in the legal and financial arrangements needed to found institutions.

Her most lasting institutional legacy is bound up with the Salesian apostolate in Spain. She pressed for the establishment of Salesian schools and oratories in Barcelona and supported the devotion to Mary Help of Christians that Don Bosco had spread from Turin. In 1886 Saint John Bosco himself visited Barcelona; Chopitea was among those who received him and who underwrote the Salesian foundation in the city. After she was widowed in 1882 she continued and even increased her benefactions, living a life of piety and charity that impressed both clergy and the urban poor. She was known in Barcelona for personal as well as institutional charity toward the needy.

Dorotea de Chopitea died in Barcelona on 3 April 1891. She was buried in the church of María Auxiliadora in Barcelona, the Salesian sanctuary associated with the works she had helped to create. A canonical process was later opened, and on 9 June 1983 Pope John Paul II declared her Venerable, affirming that she had practiced the Christian virtues to a heroic degree. She has not been beatified or canonized and therefore has no universal feast day or official patronages. Historians remember her as a nineteenth-century laywoman of Chilean birth whose fortune and energy left a durable mark on the Catholic educational and charitable landscape of Barcelona.

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