Spain & Portugal Map 1882 Railways & Telegraph Cables Atlas Print - Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, Porto

Edward Stanford of London published this Spain and Portugal in 1882 in Stanford's London Atlas of Universal Geography, the quarto edition of forty-four colored maps. The steel-engraved sheet measures 33 by 26 centimeters at a scale of 1:3,700,000 and shows political boundaries, railways, topography, drainage and submarine telegraph cables, with relief in hachures, a legend and a bar scale. Stanford had acquired the London atlas of 1834 from John Arrowsmith in 1874, and the preface of the quarto edition describes a handy atlas that would give the usual maps on a sufficient scale for ordinary reference and repeat on larger scales the parts of the earth most nearly connected with English interests. It shows the Iberian Peninsula in 1882, with its hand finishing and its steel-engraved lines.

By 1882 King Alfonso XII had restored the Bourbon monarchy in Spain after the turmoil of the 1870s, and Portugal remained a constitutional monarchy under Luis I, so the political scene was calmer than a decade earlier. The railways of both countries were still being extended, and the submarine telegraph cables the sheet records connected the peninsula to Britain. That was the concern of an atlas that, by its preface, laid special weight on English interests. Like the rest of the quarto edition, the map was meant for ordinary reference rather than for specialists, giving the provinces, the drainage and the hachured relief of a country that British readers followed closely.

A reader of Victorian travel and telegraphy history, a collector of Stanford atlas maps, or a family with roots in Spain or Portugal will find a thoughtful gift here. TheMapVault's SDUK sheet of 1872 shows the provinces of the same peninsula a decade earlier, whereas this 1882 sheet adds railways and submarine telegraph cables and comes from the same London publisher at the height of its atlas work. 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.