Galdosian route: 02. the Colegio San Agustín

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Routes · Subcategory: Galdosian route

Galdós joined the Colegio de San Agustín in the course of 1857 to study secondary education, staying there until going onto Baccalaureate studies in 1862, doing his final year studies at the Instituto Provincial de La Laguna.

His closest school friends at the Colegio included Fernando León y Castillo, Nicolás Estévanez and Fernando Inglot, who like Galdós, would become leading figures.

San Agustín was the setting for an intense creative literary period for Galdós. In the pages of youth newspaper "La Antorcha" he published his first poetic compositions: La Emilianada (epic poem), El pollo and El teatro nuevo (satire), and narratives: Un viaje redondo and El sol, as well as his first theatrical drama: Quien mal hace, bien no espere. Around this time he also started collaborating with "El Ómnibus".

His abilities to sketch also got him into some bother in the Colegio, with his caricatures popping up in his textbooks and manuscripts, as well as in the Libros de Oficio del Colegio.

In 1844, the Gabinete Literario founded the first Primary and Secondary School in Las Palmas. The centre owes its name to the Convent of San Agustín, which was turned into the headquarters of the Colegio in 1851. It remained there until 1864 when it moved to calle de los Balcones and then on to the Seminary on calle López Botas. The last place for the "San Agustín" school was in La Herrería. It finally closed its doors for the last time in 1917, when it started functioning as a public Institute under the name of Pérez Galdós at its current site of the Rectory at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

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