Plaza de José Castillejo

José Castillejo Duarte was born in Ciudad Real in 1877, became a professor of Roman law at the Universidad Central, and in 1907 was named secretary of the Board for Advanced Studies, the body that for nearly three decades sent hundreds of young people to study in Paris, Berlin, London, or Rome and bring back the science Spain lacked. A disciple of Giner de los Ríos and a man of the Free Educational Institution, he managed those foreign grants until 1934. The scholarship system he built is counted among the forerunners of today’s European university exchanges. The Civil War undid his work: he escaped the squad sent to arrest him, left Spain with the help of the British embassy, and died in English exile in 1945, after teaching at the University of Liverpool. Plaza de José Castillejo lies in El Viso, the rationalist neighborhood built in the 1930s, the same years those grant holders were returning from Europe.