What Alberto Jiménez Fraud denominated the "chair of the Residencia" congregated, between 1910 and 1936, a brilliant group of lecturers from around the world and the most diverse fields, among which were Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Le Corbusier, Paul Valéry, Igor Stravinsky or Alexander Calder. The Residencia's cosmopolitan calling turned it into a place of dissemination of the most outstanding cultural manifestations and scientific discoveries of the time, in accordance with the modernizing project of Spanish society inspired by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, encouraged by the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios, from which the Residencia was dependent.

The knowledge of those remote civilizations and geographical regions implies the interest for other peoples and cultures, the respect for their customs, the exchange of knowledge, and the fostering of tolerance and human values both from the recognition of what is common to diverse societies as from the characteristics that differentiate them. This is the same spirit of knowledge exchange that was promoted by the Junta's program of travel grants or by projects such as the Pedagogical Missions, the university student theatre La Barraca or the Mediterranean university cruise, initiatives that share the component of adventure that in those days, as today, is associated to scientific creation and research.