Escuelas Nieto

If you’re interested in Vigo’s civilian architecture, we recommend you visit the Escuelas Nieto (Schools). Ramón Nieto was one of the thousands of emigrants who left the Port of Vigo seeking a better future across the ocean. Thus, his family moved to Chile, where he became the Presidency Councillor.

Ramón Nieto never forgot Lavadores, the neighbourhood where he was born in 1856 and where lived until he emigrated at the age of 14. He knew the hardships endured by those who had been his friends, his colleagues, and in 1900 he commissioned his old teacher, Severino Cobas, to create the Escuelas Nieto.

The beautiful original Escuelas Nieto building, which is currently the Toy Library, was built to fulfil Nieto’s dream: provide quality education for underprivileged children, and his success was such that Escuelas Nieto had to be expanded a few years later.

Since then, Lavadores’s children have continued to attend school there, respecting the very modern rules established by Ramón Nieto at the time: the learning of foreign languages, scholarship to study abroad, the prohibition of physical and psychological punishment