The Residencia de Estudiantes opened its doors on October 1, 1910 in Madrid under the direction of Alberto Jiménez Fraud. It was created by the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (JAE) (Board for Advanced Studies and Scientific Research and was inspirited by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE). According to Julio Caro Baroja, the Residencia became "the first cultural center of Spain during two decades." It was one of the main nuclei for the scientific, educational and social modernization of the country between 1910 and 1936.

 

The Residencia maintained a special relationship with Catalonia, facilitating the meetings between intellectuals from Catalonia and the rest of Spain, and inviting some of the leading representatives of Catalan culture. The writer and politician Pere Coromines a former student of Francisco Giner de los Ríos in the ILE, valued the "ambient plácid, amable lloc de calma y de repós, aont tot pren un aire de senzillesa gentil" ("the peaceful atmosphere, a friendly and quiet place to rest, where everything all has an air of gentile simplicity ") that he experienced in the Residencia in 1911.

 

This exhibition is about the history of the Residencia and the radical novelty that it meant at the time of its creation, and it presents its activities and its main protagonists: residents such Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel de Unamuno, José Moreno Villa, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, Severo Ochoa, and Gabriel Celaya, among many others. It also shows the re-opening of the Residencia during the transition to democracy in Spain, its present activities and plans for the future, and its relationship with the Catalan culture past and present.