After being granted the first award in the Great International Belvedere Competition in Vienna, together with ten more honourable mentions, María Bayo established an international career, making her début with Les pêcheurs de perles, Lucia di Lammermoor and La sonnambula in Pisa, St Gallen and Lucerne, followed by her first Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro in Madrid and at the Paris Opéra Bastille with great success.

Since then, she has been a regular guest at major international opera houses, including the Berlin Staatsoper, Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, La Scala, Milan, La Monnaie, Covent Garden, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the New York Metropolitan Opera, Salzburg Festival, Pesaro, Aix-en-Provence, Beaune, Schwetzingen, Ruhr Triennale, as well as Paris, Lyon, Geneva, Marseille, Montpellier, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Bilbao, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Houston, appearing in operas by Rossini (Il barbiere di Siviglia; Tancredi; Bianca e Falliero; Il viaggio a Reims); Donizetti (L’elisir d’amore; Don Pasquale); Puccini (La Bohème; Gianni Schicchi, Turandot); Cavalli (La Calisto); Handel (Giulio Cesare; Rinaldo); Hasse (Cleofide); Gluck (Orfeo ed Euridice); Traetta (Antigona); Massenet (Manon) Offenbach (four rôles in Les contes d’Hoffmann); Vives (Doña Francisquita); Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande); Bizet (Micaela in Carmen; Les pêcheurs de perles) and, especially Mozart (Susanna and Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro; Ilia in Idomeneo; Zerlina and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni; Despina and Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte), with leading conductors such as Sinopoli, Chailly, Sir Colin Davis, Gavazzeni, Maazel, Pappano, C. Rizzi, M.Viotti, Scimone, Bychkov, Plasson, Armin Jordan, Ros Marbá, López Cobos, Frühbeck, M. Gómez Martinez, G. Navarro, Victor Pablo, R. Jacobs, Hogwood, Alessandrini, Ivor Bolton, Rousset, and De Marchi, among others.

Her career in the concert hall has brought an equally distinguished number of engagements. Today, María Bayo is one of the most famous ambassadors of Spanish music, as her wide-ranging list of recordings attests. Among many other prizes, María Bayo has been recently granted the Principe de Viana Award, one the most prestigious prizes of culture in Spain, presented by His Royal Highness, the Prince Felipe de Borbón.