Spain & Portugal Map 1964 Pergamon World Atlas Print - Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, Porto

The Polish Army Topography Service compiled this Spain and Portugal for the Pergamon World Atlas, which Pergamon Press of Oxford issued together with Polish Scientific Publishers of Warsaw. The map is dated 1964 in the catalog, and the atlas copy is the 1968 English edition of the Polish Atlas Swiata. It measures 55 by 40 centimeters at a scale of 1:2,500,000 and is described as a detailed political and physical map, with two insets enlarging Madrid and Lisbon. It is printed on beige paper in tinted colors, with shaded relief and color gradations for the land and varying blues for the sea, so that the Pyrenees and the Sierra Nevada stand out. It shows the Iberian Peninsula in the mid-1960s.

In 1964 Spain was ruled by General Franco and Portugal by Prime Minister Salazar, two long-lived authoritarian governments that shared the peninsula, and both capitals appear in their own insets. Barcelona and Seville, together with Madrid and Lisbon, were the cities through which the tourist boom of the 1960s was beginning to flow. The catalog says the map details major cities, roads and railways, with symbols for airports and ports, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea in shades of blue to indicate depth. The atlas is a massive Cold War production, weighing nearly 5.5 kilograms by the cataloger's count, in which Polish cartographers mapped the whole world for an English-speaking readership.

A reader of twentieth-century European history, a traveler with roots in Spain or Portugal, or a collector of modern atlas maps will find a striking gift here. TheMapVault's Times Atlas sheet of 1956 shows the same peninsula in a British mid-century style, whereas this Pergamon sheet of 1964 is the Polish version, with its beige paper and the insets of both capitals. 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.