The Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP) is a Spanish institution created during the Republican period in 1932 with the goal of organising summer courses, conferences, and other academic activities to promote exchanges and dissemination of advances in the sciences and the arts. UIMP was granted from the outset a University charter, even if it would not run regular programs or confer degrees, nor have a full time faculty of its own, aside from the academic officers. The historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal and the physicist Blas Cabrera were its first rectors, and the poet Pedro Salinas was its first secretary general. Its headquarters were located at the former summer royal palace La Magdalena in the northern coastal city of Santander, with the initial denomination of Universidad Internacional de Verano de Santander.

Following the reorganization of graduate studies towards a European standard, UIMP was recently allowed to organize graduate programs and confer degrees, possibly in collaboration with other colleges and institutes, thus resembling the federal model of, for example, the University of London. It is within this framework that the association between CEMFI and UIMP developed, leading to the approval in 2006 by the Spanish authorities of the official degrees of Master in Economics and Finance and PhD in Economics.