Hispanic Liverpool | Stories

	People Find out more about the people who made up Hispanic Liverpool, such as Basque photographer Eulalia de Abaitua (left). This section includes short biographies of a representative sample of Hispanic Liverpudlians, from intellectuals to teachers to pub landlords. Is there somebody you would like to know more about? Why not contact us to request a new biography or even submit one of your own?
	Boarding Houses When migrants first arrived in Liverpool, or when sailors and traders passed through the city, they sought out the'home from home' of a boarding house where they would be able to speak their own language. Liverpool had boarding houses catering for Chinese, German, Russian and Swedish speakers - and also for different Spanish-speaking communities, including Basques and Galicians (clustered around Hurst St, left), and Filipinos.
	Merchant Villas A good proportion of the money coming into nineteenth-century Liverpool came via trade with the Luso-Hispanic world. From the 1870s onwards, Liverpool's wealthiest merchants built enormous mansions around newly-laid-out Sefton Park, and many of them named their homes for the towns and cities where they had made their money. The gatepost on the left belongs to "Olinda", once owned by the Brocklehurst family, who named their home after the northeastern Brazilian city where they carried out much of their trade.
	Shipping Companies Liverpool was a global hub for trade in commodities, capital, and even people. During the long nineteenth century, Liverpool merchants, brokers and businessmen moved millions of people and millions of tons of goods around the world. Investigating the companies who facilitated Liverpool's trading connections with its sister ports across the Luso-Hispanic world can provide insights not only into trade or economic history, but also the cultural context and changing reception of the commodities they carried. Companies often chose meaningful names for their ships too; the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co.'s Araguaya (left) was named for a river in Brazil. Find out more at the ship names glossary.