Spain & Portugal Map 1831 Atlas Print - Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, Porto

John Dower drew and engraved this Spain & Portugal for Henry Teesdale & Co. of London, and it was issued in 1831 in the first edition of A New General Atlas of the World, an atlas also known as Teesdale's Atlas. The catalog describes it as an outline hand-colored map at a scale of 1:3,700,000, showing administrative divisions, cities, towns, roads, rivers, lakes and canals, with relief drawn in hachures and the prime meridian at Greenwich. The sheet covers the whole Iberian Peninsula together with the Balearic Islands, and major regions such as Galicia, Andalusia and Catalonia are set apart by colored outlines. It shows Spain and Portugal in 1831, a year when both kingdoms were divided by dynastic quarrels.

In Spain, King Ferdinand VII was in the last years of an absolute reign that would end with his death in 1833 and open the Carlist wars over the succession, while Portugal was in the middle of its own civil war between the supporters of Dom Miguel and those of Dom Pedro and his daughter Maria. Madrid was the Spanish capital and Lisbon the Portuguese one, and the Tagus, which flows through both countries, tied the two kingdoms together. Barcelona was the commercial center of Catalonia, Seville the old river port of Andalusia, and Porto the wine city of the north. Because the sheet was compiled for British readers, it shows a peninsula that London merchants and veterans of the Peninsular War knew well.

A student of the Peninsular War era, a family with roots in Catalonia, Galicia or the Algarve, or a collector of Georgian English atlas maps will find a handsome gift here. TheMapVault's Tanner sheet of 1836 and its Mitchell sheet of 1846 are the American views of the peninsula, whereas this Dower sheet is the London original, outlined in hand color and engraved in the first year of the atlas. 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.