Picasso in Málaga: The Birth City, the Ten Years and the Sites That Survive

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881, on the second floor of number 36 of the Plaza de la Merced, the house numbered 15 today. The birth was attended by his paternal uncle, Doctor Salvador Ruiz, a detail the Fundación Picasso records in its own account of the artist and the city. His parents were José Ruiz Blasco, a drawing teacher born in Málaga in 1838, and María Picasso López, born in Málaga in 1855. They had married in 1880, and Pablo was the first of their three children, before Dolores and María de la Concepción.

The civil register gives him a name that fills a whole line: Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, Crispiniano y de la Santísima Trinidad, with María de los Remedios added on the baptism record. Sixteen days after his birth, on 10 November 1881, he was baptised at the parish church of Santiago on Calle Granada, a few streets below the square. The Fundación Picasso, which runs the birthplace museum, warns honestly that the anecdotes of his childhood were often embellished or exaggerated, so the small stories told about the baby on the Plaza should all be read with that caution.

José Ruiz Blasco taught drawing at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Telmo and curated the Museo Municipal, which then sat in the former Convento de San Agustín, the block below today's Picasso museum. He was a painter of animals, above all birds, and still lifes. Wikipedia describes him as a professor at the School of Crafts and curator of a local museum, while the Fundación names the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Telmo, so the exact school name differs between the two accounts. What both agree on is the pigeons. One of Pablo's earliest drawings, made in Málaga about 1890, shows pigeons in a dovecote, and at the 1950 Sheffield peace congress Picasso told the story of learning to paint pigeons from his father. The further tale that Don José gave up painting after seeing his thirteen-year-old son's pigeon is marked apocryphal by Wikipedia.

The two earliest surviving works from the Málaga years are the oil Vista del puerto de Málaga from 1888 and El picador amarillo from about 1889, which the Fundación dates only as "h. 1889". Pablo attended the Colegio de San Rafael on Calle Comedias, and his father took him to the Plaza de Toros de La Malagueta, where he saw many bullfights. Bullfighting and pigeons, the Fundación notes, became lifelong themes drawn from this childhood. The city he grew up in was hard, too. Málaga in 1881 was declining after a prosperous century of wine, raisins, iron and textiles, phylloxera had destroyed almost all the province's vineyards by about 1885, an earthquake struck in 1884 and the 1885 cholera epidemic killed about 2,500 people.

In mid-October 1891 the Ruiz Blasco family left Málaga for La Coruña in the north, where Don José had taken a chair of drawing. From 1895 they lived in Barcelona, where his father took a post at the Escuela de la Llotja. The Fundación counts the Málaga balance as barely ten years and some brief seasons, which is why the five returns matter so much to the story of Picasso in Málaga.

He was back between April and September 1895, and again in the summers of 1896, 1897 and 1899. The fifth and last stay came in the winter of 1900 to 1901, a few days only, travelling with his friend Casagemas, and ended on 28 January 1901. From 1904 Picasso lived in France, and he died there in 1973, never returning to the city of his birth.

The city stayed with him. In 1957 a group of young Málaga painters visited him at Cannes, and he asked them whether the marble benches and the pebbles of the Plaza de la Merced survived, and whether the pigeons were still there. In the book Querido Picasso, Josep Palau i Fabre reports Jacqueline, Picasso's wife, reminding him that he had once said he would like to be buried in the Plaza de la Merced. That is a reported remark, not a documented plan, and should be read as such. The pigeon story from Sheffield in 1950, where he spoke at the peace congress, is better documented but still comes from his own telling.

Six places, in the order a visitor meets them from the square. Two are museums with a tariff, one is a working parish church, one is a building his father worked in, one is the bullring and one is on the list only because readers ask about it.

The Birth House, Room by Room

The Casa Natal, run by the Fundación Picasso that the city created in 1988, fills two floors of the birth house. The first-floor family rooms hold the christening gown, his baby shirt and umbilical band, one of the shoes he learned to walk in, the lead figurines he played with, and a facsimile of the baptism record from Santiago. The main salon opens onto the Plaza de la Merced with 19th-century furniture and oils that belonged to the family.

Downstairs is the collection's most valuable object, sketchbook number 7 for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 84 drawings from 1907 and the only one of the 16 surviving sketchbooks for that painting held in Spain. Section 7, called Palomas, traces the pigeon theme from his father's studio to the 1949 lithograph that became the Paris Peace Congress poster. The Picasso's Birthplace Museum entrance ticket at $4.65 is the open-dated version for a phone, and the audio guide is free in six languages either way.

The Palace, the Church and the Ring

The Museo Picasso Málaga opened on 17 October 2003 with the King and Queen of Spain present, in the Palacio de Buenavista, a 16th-century palace built over the remains of a Nasrid palace. Its core is the gift of 155 works from Christine Ruiz-Picasso, widow of Picasso's eldest son Paulo, and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, his grandson. Under your feet as you walk are a Phoenician wall and towers and a Roman garum factory.

The current hang, Structures of Invention, runs to 30 January 2028 with about 144 works from 1895 to 1972. The church of Santiago carries a contested founding date, with the Spanish Wikipedia infobox saying 1490 and its own text saying construction began about 1509. The bullring is simpler: built between 1874 and its inauguration on 11 June 1876, and the Fundación notes simply that Pablo saw many corridas there with his father.

Both museums have free hours, and they work differently. The Casa Natal is free every Sunday from 16:00 to 20:00, a fixed window, and also on 28 February, 18 May, 27 September, 25 October and a variable date in May. The palace follows the season instead, opening free for the last two hours of every Sunday, so 17:00 to 19:00 in March to June and September to October, 18:00 to 20:00 in July and August, and 16:00 to 18:00 in November to February, plus 28 February, 18 May, 27 September and 27 October, the museum's own anniversary.

Age rules differ too. At the palace, children under 17 enter free, along with job seekers, ICOM members and others on the museum's list. At the Casa Natal the free list starts at under 18. One thing worth knowing: the Casa Natal adds $0.35 (€0.30) of processing to every online ticket and has no timed entry to protect, so buy at the desk. The Málaga museums hub lists every free window in the city in one place, and the Picasso Museum tickets page compares the paid options if the free hours are crowded.

You can cover the whole of Picasso's Málaga in one morning, since everything sits inside the Centro Histórico except the bullring. Go early, start at the square where he was born, and let the walk run downhill and out to the sea. The order below follows his own geography, from the birth house to the sand of La Malagueta, and leaves the cathedral as an optional detour between the museum and the school.

If you only have time for two stops, make them the two museums, and use the things to do hub to fill the rest of the day.

• Start at the Casa Natal Picasso on Plaza de la Merced 15, his birth house, and allow about an hour
• Walk 3 minutes, our estimate, down Calle Granada to the Iglesia de Santiago, where he was baptised on 10 November 1881
• Walk 4 minutes, our estimate, to the Museo Picasso Málaga on Calle San Agustín, past the former Convento de San Agustín where his father curated the Museo Municipal
• Optional detour 4 minutes, our estimate, to Málaga Cathedral between the museum and the school
• Walk 8 minutes, our estimate, from the Casa Natal to the Escuela de San Telmo on Plaza de la Constitución, where his father taught
• Finish 15 minutes, our estimate, from the Casa Natal at the Plaza de Toros de La Malagueta, where he watched corridas with his father