Spain & Portugal Map 1872 Provinces Family Atlas Print - Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, Porto

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a British body founded to spread inexpensive education, is credited with this Spain and Portugal in Provinces, which Edward Stanford of London issued in 1872 in The Family Atlas, a collection of eighty maps engraved on steel. The catalog lists it at a scale of 1:3,500,000 and calls it a somewhat updated version of the 1865 issue. It is hand colored, with Spain in pink and Portugal in green, and the catalog description notes the Pyrenees, the Sierra Nevada and the Cantabrian Mountains, the rivers Tagus and Ebro, and the Balearic Islands among its features. It shows the Iberian Peninsula in 1872, in the middle of the most turbulent decade in modern Spanish history.

Queen Isabella II had been driven from Spain in 1868, and by 1872 the country was ruled by an Italian king, Amadeo of Savoy, whose reign would end with his abdication in February 1873 and the proclamation of the First Republic. Madrid was the capital in which these changes played out, while Barcelona and Seville, both marked on the map, were the great cities of Catalonia and Andalusia. Portugal, to the west, was a quieter constitutional monarchy under King Luis I, with Lisbon as its capital on the Tagus. A map of the provinces of both countries therefore recorded administrative divisions that outlasted the dynasties, which is just what a family atlas existed to show.

A reader of Spanish political history, a family with roots in the provinces of either country, or a collector of Victorian atlas maps will find a worthwhile gift here. TheMapVault's Stanford sheet of 1882 shows the same peninsula a decade later, with railways and submarine telegraph cables, whereas this 1872 sheet is the provincial map of the Family Atlas, divided into pink and green. Its Johnson sheet of 1860 and Colton sheet of 1856 give the American view of the same lands. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.