Biography | Pablo Picasso — The Second Floor on Plaza de la Merced Where He Was Born

The house looks like any other corner block on Plaza de la Merced. It is not. On the night of 25 October 1881, María Picasso López gave birth to her first child on the second floor of what was then number 36 — today number 15 — in this square in Málaga. The boy was registered Pablo Ruiz Picasso. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a painter and drawing master who had rented the floor the year before, after the marriage. The building itself is later than the story people want. The north side of the square was put up in the 1860s and 1870s on ground that had belonged to a convent. Picasso did not stay in this exact apartment for long. In 1884 the family moved two doors down, to the third floor of number 32 on the same plaza, and they left Málaga altogether for A Coruña in 1891, when he was nine. He was baptised nearby, at the church of Santiago Apóstol. Blue-and-white tile plaques around the square still mark the second family house and the places his father used. The birth rooms became a museum much later. The house was declared a historic-artistic monument in 1983. Málaga City Council created the Picasso Foundation in 1988 and opened the principal floor to the public that year. A fuller restoration of the block was inaugurated by the Spanish monarchs on 22 June 1998. What you walk through now is a house-museum of early objects, family papers, and a small collection — not a reconstruction of the 1881 rooms as they stood on the night he was born. Parts of the block remain ordinary residences. The useful correction is geographic, not sentimental. Picasso did almost none of the work that made his name in this city. He carried the name of the square, the harbour light, and his mother's surname into studios in Barcelona and Paris. Stand on the paving outside number 15 and you are at the start of that line, not at the studio. Photo: Tajchman, CC BY-SA 3.0 es, via Wikimedia Commons