Plaza del Marqués de Comillas

The title of Marquis of Comillas was born of an emigrant from Cantabria, Antonio López, who left for Cuba as a penniless boy and returned with one of the greatest fortunes of the nineteenth century, made under cover of the slave trade and later of banking and the Trasatlántica shipping line. The square recalls not the founder but his son Claudio López Bru (1853-1925), second marquis. Claudio inherited the empire in 1883 and turned it toward a militant Catholicism. He sustained the seminary of Comillas, raised to a pontifical university in 1904, and came to be called the greatest almsgiver in Spain; when the Messina earthquake devastated Sicily in 1908, he had one of his ships converted into a floating hospital. The square opens in Vallehermoso, toward the paseo de Juan XXIII. The sign recalls a man who funded seminaries with money that, two generations earlier, had come from the holds of slave ships.