Antonio López y López

Antonio López y López, 1st Marquess of Comillas, GE (18171883) was a Spanish businessman, slave trader and shipping magnate. He was the founder of several important companies and one of the world's wealthiest individuals in the second half of the nineteenth century.

After his death, his son Claudio López Bru took over the responsibility of running the companies his father had founded.

Biography Antonio López emigrated to colonial Cuba in 1831 while still a teenager and lived in Santiago de Cuba. He took an interest in shipping and in 1850 he founded the "Compañia de Vapores Correos A. López" which began operations with a 400-ton hybrid sailing ship-sidewheel steamer. This company would eventually become the Compañía Transatlántica Española ocean line in 1881. In Cuba, he was involved in trading slaves, purchasing enslaved Africans who had been illegally landed on Cuba's eastern coast and selling them in several Cuban cities.

In 1876 he became the co-founder and first president of the , established in Barcelona. He also led the Banco de Crédito Mercantil. Eventually his children became part of the high society in Barcelona and Antonio López became the father-in-law of Eusebi Güell after his daughter Isabel López Bru married him.

At the prompting of Jesuit Tomás Gómez Carral Antonio López agreed to finance the construction of the Comillas Pontifical University, but he died in 1883 in Barcelona in the very year of the groundbreaking ceremony.

Legacy and honors

Antonio López was the founder of the following companies: Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas, Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España, and Compañía Transatlántica Española, among others.

In 1877 writer Jacint Verdaguer wrote the Catalan language poem L'Atlàntida in his honour. On March 4, 2018 the monument was finally removed after a campaign denouncing the involvement of Antonio López in the slave trade.

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