In Spain from the late nineteenth century, the "People's Houses" (Casas del Pueblo) corresponded to a desire to provide and organize a space of sociability for workers and their families. This formed part of the diverse Spanish popular education movement. This article focuses on the project to translate the model of the Belgian Maison du Peuple into the Spanish context, and the plans and activities of two cultural and educational socialist institutions directly inspired by similar Belgian institutions: the Central de Educacion Socialista (Centre of Socialist Education) founded in 1913 on the model of the Centrale d'Education Ouvriere (Centre of Labour Education), and the Escuela Obrera Socialista (Socialist Labour School) founded in 1929 and based on the Ecole Ouvriere Superieure (Upper Labour School). The comparison with the Belgian models allows us to see the distance between hope and reality. In fact, what interested the Spanish Socialists in the Belgian experience was more the general idea, the name and the concrete means to formalize it, rather than the pedagogic methods used, which inscribed both in a national and international perspective. (Contains 118 endnotes.)