El Ortega y Gasset University Institute It has its headquarters in a garden palace located in the heart of Madrid, between Miguel Ángel and General Martínez Campos streets. We find two buildings in the same area, the old Ladies Residence from the Board for the Expansion of Studies, and another designed by the architect Carlos Arniches Moltó and built from 1932 to 1933, a paradigmatic work of the rationalist architecture of the XNUMXs, as it is a work of great importance we will refer to it in another entry of 365 days in Madrid.

Since its creation, the aforementioned female group has settled in the small hotels on Fortuny Street in Madrid. They had been left free when the male group moved to the Poplar Hill.

The importance of the work promoted by the Free Education Institution is of colossal dimensions not recognized with justice after the recovery of democracy. We copied two full paragraphs from the website of the Giner Foundation since they seem very interesting to us to value the space to which we refer:

“The Residencia de Señoritas was created in 1915 to promote women's access to higher education. Inscribed in the reformist and liberal project defined by the Free Education Institution, the new female group of the Student Residence, directed by María de Maeztu, established the channels for the educational and cultural promotion of women and their integration into modern life . In his aspirations and achievements he followed the same guidelines established for the male group. In its development, collaboration with the International Institute in Spain, an American entity with similar objectives that had settled in Madrid at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, was essential.

Victoria Kent, Matilde Huici and Josefina Carabias were residents, and María Goyri, María Zambrano and Maruja Mallo were part of its teaching staff, in addition to the North American teachers linked to the International Institute. Numerous speakers participated in the activities it organized, such as Gabriela Mistral, Victoria Ocampo and Clara Campoamor, and topics related to women were frequently addressed. The Lyceum Club Femenino and the Spanish Association of University Women were born in its halls. It also had a Chemistry Laboratory, organized by the American Mary Louise Foster, who contributed to the training of outstanding scientists, such as Dorotea Barnés or Felisa Martín Bravo.”

We still have several spaces dedicated to Free Institution of Education that we will unravel little by little.

Today the headquarters of the Ortega-Marañón Foundation, a private institution dedicated to cultural dissemination, training, debate and research in the field of social sciences and humanities, inspired by the spirit of its owners, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and the doctor and humanist Gregorio Marañón .

A hug