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Merced´s square

Diputación de Málaga
Monumento a Torrijos. Plaza de la Constitución. Málaga

Merced´s square

Zip Code 29012
Monuments and Art > Remarkable Building

This square is to be found at the end of calle Alcazabilla and it contains the obelisk erected as a tribute to General Torrijos, as well as the house where Picasso was born, currently the headquarters of the Picasso Foundation.

The place that witnessed Pablo Ruiz Picasso's first games as a child, and perhaps even his first drawings in the dust, was the Plaza de la Merced.
It was here, in this busy and romantic corner of Malaga, that his parents met, and it was here that politicians such as General Riego, sculptors such as Fernando Ortiz, writers such as Juan Josê Relosillas, architects such as Gerónimo Cuervo or painters such as Bernardo Ferrándiz, had their residence. At the end of the 15th century the square housed a public market and by the end of the 19th century it had become a place where the bourgeoisie dedicated themselves to pleasure and leisure.

A mosaic of different personalities, which in time, the artist would reflect in his works, heard thus the bells of the La Merced Church, next to Picasso's house. The shouts of vendors selling turkeys, milk from straight from the goat, sweets, jasmine posies, jams or guitars, merged with the chatter of servants and soldiers around the monolith that stands in the centre of this tree-lined square dedicated to General Torrijos, its slogans of freedom and justice constituting a point of reference to that child called Pablo Ruiz Picasso.

Furthermore, even today the square is filled with the flight of pigeons and doves, as it was then, a symbol of the paradigms set out on the cenotaph of the fallen general. They are the doves that Picasso, from when he was a child and until his death, painted - by the hand of his father - as the eternal and legendary emblem of his extensive work.
 

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