Blas Cabrera Felipe (1878-1945), a universal Canarian scientist, was born in Arrecife (Lanzarote) in May 1878. At the early age of three, he moved with his parents to La Laguna (Tenerife), where he spent his childhood and adolescence. He met María Sánchez Real, from La Laguna, with whom he would start a family of three sons, Blas, Nicolás, and Luis. After his high school studies at the Instituto de Canarias in La Laguna, he went to the Central University of Madrid (now the Complutense University), where he became a Professor of Physics. He promoted and was the first director of the "National Institute of Physics and Chemistry," with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. It was inaugurated in 1932, marking a turning point in the development of experimental physics in Spain, hence his nickname as the "father of Spanish physics." Today, it is the headquarters of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) and has borne his name since 2023, the "Blas Cabrera Institute of Physical Chemistry." It hosted Albert Einstein's historic and only visit to Spain in 1923. He was part of the European scientific elite in the first half of the 20th century and part of that unique group of "fathers of quantum physics," along with his colleagues Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and other great scientists. He was the only Spaniard on the select scientific committee of the "Solvay" Councils in Brussels between 1928 and 1933, considered the most important congresses in the history of physics and where the foundations were laid for much of the science that surrounds us today, such as nanotechnology and the atomic age. The recent recovery of his memory and his unpublished manuscript legacy, including the repatriation of his remains to La Laguna, Tenerife, in 2022, from his unjust exile in Mexico after the Civil War, makes us realize how important we have been in the history of physics, achieving important goals in science.
