Plaza de Andrés Manjón

Andrés Manjón, a priest and professor of law in Granada, lived in a bare cell at the Sacromonte abbey and crossed the Roma caves each day on his way there. One morning around 1888, the story goes, he heard illiterate children reciting the Hail Mary inside a cave, and from that came the idea that filled the rest of his life. In 1889 he bought a walled garden and opened his first free school for the children of the poorest families. He ran it outdoors: lessons in courtyards and gardens, games, maps painted on the ground, learning through the body and nature. He called them the Ave María Schools, and by his death they had spread across thirty-six provinces and reached Spanish America. The square sits in the Castilla neighborhood, among streets named after teachers. Barely over a hundred meters long, it is a short pause among names that belong in a classroom.