In the Plaza de la Merced (formerly Plaza de Riego), one of the most significant areas in Málaga for its historical and cultural importance, stands the house where Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born. It was built in 1861 by the master mason Diego Clavero, on the site that remained following the seizure of church property, specifically the convent of Santa Maria de la Paz. Together with the rest of the houses that stretch along the northeast sector of the square, this harmonious arrangement of houses is known as the Casas de Campos, completed in the 1870s and named after the developer, Antonio Campos Garin, Marquis of Iznate.

The first floor of this house – then number 36 – was rented by José Ruiz Blasco (1838-1913) in 1880 when he married Maria Picasso Lopez (1855-1938), and there, the couple’s first son, Pablo, was born on the night of 25 October 1881. The family lived there until 1884, when they moved to number 32 in the same square. In 1983, it was declared an Historical-Artistic Monument of National Interest, and in 1988, Málaga City Council set up a museum dedicated to this universal artist, an established institution that still retains part of the 19th century structure and which currently displays a great number of Picasso's mementos and art works that bear witness to his academic learning and the influence of Málaga through themes such as doves, the Mediterranean, bulls, as well as his nostalgia for Spain.

In 1997, his first home was fully restored, and there is now an outstanding Exhibition Hall just a few metres away, in No. 13 Plaza de la Merced.

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With a new baby on the way, the Ruiz Picasso moved to number 17, Plaza de la Merced. Lola, their second child, was born in December 1883. María de los Remedios followed in December 1887. They definitely needed a larger house, which they shared with Inés López Robles, Pablo’s grandmother on his mother’s side; Eladia and Heliodora Picasso López, his aunts; and the family’s maid. This meant that little Pablo, who was the only boy, grew up surrounded and taken care of by women. He would later remember – and retell – his grandma’s tales in particular. All the ladies paid attention to him, and he was a privileged witness to all home affairs, always on the alert. Eladia and Heliodora used to work at home, sewing the uniform stripes for the national railway company. As a man, Picasso was able to draw all their shapes, patterns and sparkles from his memories of those days. Also, he used to grab his aunts’ scissors to cut out lovely figures – animals, flowers, garlands, as requested by his sisters and cousins.

Picasso was baptised in the parish church of Santiago, in the rather grand Calle Granada, formerly Calle Real, which was the local parish for his home in the Plaza de la Merced. He was christened on 10 November 1881 by the priest from the Iglesia de la Merced, José Fernández Quintero, and with the baptismal waters he was given the names Pablo Diego José y Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad, with Juan Nepomuceno Blasco Barroso and María de los Remedios Alarcón y Herrera as his godparents.

In the parish church of Santiago, one of the oldest in Málaga, with a baroque interior and a Mudejar tower, his paternal grandparents had married in 1820 and his parents in 1880. In that same font, his two sisters also received the baptismal waters: Dolores (1884-1958) and Concepción (1887-1895).

It is the finest example of Romantic architecture in town. Originally bounded by the Arab walls to the south and by the Convent of Nuestra Señora de la Paz to the north (where the Picasso House Museum stands), it features an obelisk that is a funerary monument to General José María de Torrijos, shot on the beach of San Esteban in 1831 after leading a thwarted uprising against Ferdinand VII of Spain. In the corner where the House Museum now stands, at number 14, there used to be a church, Iglesia de la Merced, which was brought down by the antireligious movement in May 1931. With its flower beds, its horse chestnuts and its benches, the square was a lively spot and a popular meeting place in Málaga.

The photograph shows a standing four-year-old Pablo Ruiz Picasso, wearing his school uniform and looking serious, maybe scared even. Francisco Martín Ramos had his studio in this square. A professional photographer, he had four children who became photographers as well. They were known as the Martín Oliver Brothers. Francisco Martín Ramos came to Málaga from Pruna, Seville, when he was 20. He became the most popular portrait photographer of the local society in those years.

This school, located at No. 20 Calle Comedias, was run by Emilio Gutiérrez, and we know, from Picasso himself, how his nanny, Carmen Mendoza – model for one of his youthful drawings – would have to drag him there every morning. The time Picasso spent at this private school is full of memories. As an old man, he recounted to his biographers and friends how he spent hours drawing and staring out the window, how he escaped to visit the headmaster’s wife in the same building, and the personal objects belonging to his father that he would take to class with him (a brush, a cane, a dove…) to make sure that they would come and collect him at one in the afternoon.

In the 20th Century, the site of this school, the Escuela de San Pedro and San Rafael, moved to the Plaza de San Francisco, where the Artistic and Literary Lyceum of Málaga was also located. Currently this building is not open to the public.

Dolores Ruiz Picasso, better known as Lola, was Pablo’s buddy as a child. She went to the renowned School of La Sagrada Familia, run by French nuns, which was a pebble’s throw from the family home in Plaza de la Merced. When the family moved to La Coruña, Lola studied music.

After moving to Barcelona, in 1909, she married the neuropsychiatrist Juan Bautista Vilató Gómez, whose parents were a professor of neurobiology from Barcelona and a woman from Málaga. Lola and Juan had six children; two of them became artists like their uncle – José Vilató Ruiz and Javier Vilató Ruiz. Lola became the living memory of the life of the Ruiz Picasso family in Málaga.

Built by the sea in 1874 and inaugurated with cattle owned the widow of Murube in 1876, the Plaza de Toros de la Malagueta was, from the time Picasso was a child, a recurrent reference and motif in his early drawings and oil paintings, and a later projection of Picasso’s whole vision of bullfighting. Works such as The Picador (h. 1889) and his drawings of bullfighting scenes, which he created whilst living in Málaga and La Coruña, are but memories of when the young artist would go with his father to watch the most famous bullfighters of the day: Mazzantini and Lagartijo.

Picasso retained a series of memories of this bullring, such as the day he saw his master, José Moreno Carbonero, paint a large canvas for one of his historic paintings, or the sight of horses gored by the bulls, which he would later use profusely as a reference in many of his compositions in the 1930s, and which would culminate with the famous wounded horse of Guernica (1937).

Since his father taught technical drawing and adornment at the Málaga School, which was located in the Plaza de la Constitucion at the entrance of Calle Compañía, this was the first place where Pablo Picasso came into contact with the classical plaster models that, a few years later, in La Coruña and Barcelona, he copied as a required subject for his studies.

The many painters who passed through the classrooms of San Telmo were also teachers and friends to José Ruiz Blasco, and, therefore, also to the young Picasso, who clearly learned from them as a skilled pupil, applying the lessons learned to his later work. Bernardo Ferrándiz, Muñoz Degrain, Martínez de la Vega, and Moreno Carbonero, working in the last third of the 19th Century, created a Golden Age for painting in Málaga, and Picasso took advantage of this, seeing first-hand the magnitude of the great historical scenes they painted, which were so in vogue at that time.

Currently the building is the seat of the Ateneo de Málaga cultural association. It has an exhibition hall that puts on exhibitions of visual arts.

In the Plaza de la Merced, on the corner with Calle Granada, you will find Farmacia Bustamante, a pharmacy formerly belonging to Antonio Mamely, a place where Picasso's father would occasionally meet with friends.

Opened in 1747, it is the oldest pharmacy in the city of Málaga. José Ruiz Blasco was in the back room of this pharmacy when an earthquake struck the city on Christmas Day 1884, forever casting a tragic memory in the young Picasso. From there, José Ruiz Blasco headed across the square to collect his family and head to a safer place.

The Municipal Museum was on the second floor of the building that, from 1869 onwards, housed the city hall, in Calle San Agustin. This building, former site of the seminary of San Juan de Dios, the monastery of the Augustinian Fathers, and the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Málaga, was known to Picasso because his father worked there from 1879 onwards as a curator of the paintings on public display there at the time.

Picasso often recalled the workshop where his father spent hours as a drawing teacher: “The workshop that was a room like any other, nothing special about it: a little dirtier, if anything, than the one I had at home; but it was quiet there,” the master recalled.Indeed, one of the first oil paintings by his son Pablo - View of the port of Málaga (h.1890) - was copied from the one made by his father, in turn reproduced from the one painted in 1878 by the seascape painter Emilio Ocón.

The building is currently under construction, waiting to be turned into the Málaga Provincial Library.

The Liceo de Málaga, located in the Plaza de San Francisco, in the same place where the Maria Cristina Royal Conservatory now stands, was the quintessential gathering place for artists in Málaga in the 19th century. Built on part of the former convent of San Francisco, after which this small square is named – home to the Pomona fountain (1864) – this recreational centre was almost certainly attended by Picasso accompanied by his father, who regularly attended the gatherings held there, providing young Pablo with the opportunity to see the works that artists of the day had left behind as a memento of the time they spent here.

In this Lyceum, a genuine pictorial museum and library of the 19th Century, in one of the rooms known as El Senado, meetings of its most distinguished members were held, and it was here that Pablo Picasso would be baptised with champagne by Martinez de la Vega, to celebrate the success achieved by the young artist at the National and Provincial Exhibitions of Fine Arts of 1897, with his work Science and Charity.

Shortly before leaving Málaga, in October 1891, Picasso was examined at the Secondary School located at No. 1 Calle Gaona. A former monastery of the Philippians, it opened its doors as a school in 1846, and three years later, the Sailing School set up on this site, a deeply rooted institution in the city.

Picasso referred on several occasions to the examination he had to undergo in order to gain access to the secondary school he attended in La Coruña, a document that has been preserved to the present day, kept with the application and payment of fees for Latin and Spanish and Geography, and which involved a brief dictation and a division, signed by Picasso at the end of June of this year. The headmaster was Ramón Ibáñez Ibáñez, who served as president of the Board that admitted the young Picasso to this school.

This street, Marín García, which used to be known as Casas Quemadas, had an inn at number 16, Las Tres Naciones, where Picasso stayed with his friend and fellow artist Carles Casagemas, when he came to Málaga for the last time. Since they refused to take care of their bohemian appearance to stay with Pablo’s uncle, doctor Salvador Ruiz y Blasco, at home in Alameda Principal – main thoroughfare of the bourgeois district in town, they were not allowed in. Picasso and Casagemas had left Paris after their first stay there to spend Christmas in Barcelona and New Year’s Eve in Málaga.

They would have sour memories of those days at the turn of the century. Moody and quarrelsome after a failed love affair in Paris, Casagemas was having a hard time, so the two friends parted ways in Málaga, never to see each other again. Back in Paris, Casagemas shot at his lover and then turned the gun and shot himself, dying in hospital later that evening. The event is widely recognised as inspiring Picasso’s Blue Period.

The street used to have an unflattering name in those years: Calle Sucia (Dirty Street). According to scholar Josep Palau i Fabre, Pablo was born here instead of in Plaza de la Merced, but the record mentioned the latter in a family effort to pretend that they were more affluent. However, no documentary evidence was found to support Palau i Fabre’s theory.

In 1936, Pablo Picasso wrote this prose poem: Yo he nacido de un padre blanco y de un pequeño vaso de agua de vida andaluza, yo he nacido de una madre hija de una hija de quince años nacida en la Málaga de los Percheles, el hermoso toro que me engendra la frente coronada de jazmines [I was born to a white father and a small glass of Andalusian eau-de-vie; I was born to a mother who was the daughter of a fifteen-year-old daughter born in the Málaga of Los Percheles, the beautiful bull that begets my jasmine-wreathed forehead].

It was in the historic district of El Perchel or Los Percheles – mentioned by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote in the seventeenth century – that Pablo’s mother, María Picasso López, grew up. The Parish Church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen and the adjoining convent, San Andrés (which was rehabilitated recently) gave shelter to General Torrijos and his men in 1881, before they were shot on a nearby beach. In 1842, their bodies were moved to the obelisk in Plaza de la Merced, where Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s birthplace stands.

Opposite the school building stood the Málaga Town Hall, now home to the Colegio de San Agustín. Picasso’s father, curator at the Town Museum, used to work there. We can easily picture the man and his son walking across Plaza de la Merced and down Granada or San Agustín Street to reach one’s school and the other’s workplace. We can see both of them looking across the street to where the other was.

The fascinating work of the artist and the beauty of the Palacio de Buenavista make the Museo Picasso Málaga a unique place to enjoy art and culture.

The MPM collection contains more than 230 pieces covering Picasso's revolutionary innovations, as well as the wide variety of material and technical styles he mastered. From his early academic studies to his personal vision of classicism; from the overlapping planes of Cubism to his explorations with ceramics; from his interpretation of the great masters to his final paintings in the seventies.

The Palacio de Buenavista is home to the Museo Picasso Málaga. Located in the heart of the historic city centre, it harmoniously blends Renaissance and Mudejar forms with the purity of contemporary lines. In the basement of this magnificent example of 16th century Andalusian architecture there is an archaeological site containing Phoenician, Roman and Arab remains, silent witnesses of the city's history.

The wonderfully evocative Museo Picasso Málaga is home to temporary exhibitions, educational and cultural activities, a library, and a specialised bookshop.