This month of October marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of International House Madrid!
Our school was opened in 1981 by four families who ran IH schools in other cities around Spain. Eulogio (from Córdoba, one of the founders of the first IH), Cedric (from Santander), Javier (from San Sebastián) and Ben (from Barcelona), who met in the Gran Cafetería Santander (which has just reopened after being closed for a few years) on Plaza Santa Ana in Alonso Martínez. They decided that Madrid needed an IH school, and their families are still the owners of IH to this day.
We opened our first centre on calle Zurbano (Alonso Martínez), and we started offering English courses, and soon after Spanish and teacher training (CELTA) courses in 1983.
The original entrance of our IH Alonso Martínez centre on Calle Zurbano, 8
During the past four decades, we’ve given lots of types of courses across lots of locations: in our own centres, in companies, in colegios, even in other parts of Spain with national-level contracts. We’ve also given (and still offer) courses of other languages (French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, and others), and in 2011 we opened an exams centre, first with Cambridge and later with IELTS, DELE (Spanish for foreigners) and nationality exams.
The entrance to our IH Alonso Martínez centre nowadays
Hundreds of thousands of students have studied and trained with us over the past 40 years, and thousands of teachers have completed their initial training courses to go on to teach across the world. We’ve also seen huge changes in our buildings and facilities, in coursebooks and methodologies and perhaps most strikingly in classroom technology (we used to use cassette players and OHPs… and are now all used to using Zoom!).
Here are some more photos of our centres over the years!:
