Spain & Portugal Map 1890 Railroads Atlas Print - Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, Porto

Samuel Augustus Mitchell's New General Atlas, published in Philadelphia by John Y. Huber and Company in 1890, is the source of this Spain & Portugal, which carries a Bradley copyright of 1887. The map measures 39 by 30 centimeters at a scale of 1:3,200,000, is hand colored, and shows relief by hachures and spot heights together with settlements, railroads and rivers. The catalog description adds the Pyrenees, the rivers Tagus, Ebro and Douro, and the Bay of Biscay, together with an inset showing the peninsula's nearness to North Africa. It is a late nineteenth-century American view of Iberia, drawn when railroad building was changing travel across both countries and when American publishers were bringing the old European kingdoms to a growing reading public.

In 1890 Spain was governed under the regency of Queen Maria Cristina for the young Alfonso XIII, and Portugal had a new king, Carlos I, who came to the throne in October 1889, so that in January 1890 Britain sent his government an ultimatum over its African claims, a humiliation that shook the monarchy. The railroads that the map marks were the means by which Madrid, Lisbon and the Atlantic and Mediterranean ports were being joined together. The Tagus, which reaches the sea at Lisbon, and the Ebro, which flows to the Mediterranean, were the two great rivers that those lines had to cross. A map of this kind therefore records the peninsula's modernization at a moment of political strain.

A railway enthusiast, a collector of American atlas cartography, or a family with roots in Spain or Portugal will find a useful gift here. TheMapVault's Mitchell sheet of 1846 shows the same peninsula in the lithographic atlas of the mid-century, whereas this 1890 sheet is the late-century edition, with railroads, spot heights and a copyright dated 1887. Its Rand McNally sheet of 1897 is the large-scale rival from Chicago. 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.