In many ways, the study of the history of Spanish cartography in recent years mirrors Spain’s dramatic transformation from relatively backward, politically isolated country to one situated at the international cross-roads of commerce, culture, and politics. This wider transformation, of course, did not occur overnight, and the same is true of the practice of cartographic history in Spain. During the Franco years, cartography represented a relatively sleepy field of historical inquiry and research. Resources were limited; practitioners few; and the lack of well-organized catalogues and finding aids hampered research. Antiquarian concerns also prevailed, as the handful of scholars who ventured into the field of map history were interested primarily in questions of authorship, chronology, and accuracy, not to mention the purely aesthetic qualities of maps.

By the end of the twentieth century, much of this kind of thinking about maps had changed, as Spain began to catch some of the excitement that, in other countries, had already transformed map history into a vital, even cutting-edge field. The “New Map History,” as it is generally known, began in Great Britain, where, starting already in the 1970s, Brian Harley moved away from the antiquarian tendencies of previous generations of cartographic history. He did so, moreover, by borrowing methods of textual interpretation from the then vibrant field of literary criticism. Harley and his followers, in both Europe and the United States, had little interest in maps as artefacts, let alone the aesthetic qualities that interested map collectors world-wide. Rather, the New Map Historians looked behind the web of lines and symbols that connoted space, distance, and terrain to the contexts in which maps were fabricated and used. In the process, maps became texts, open to all manner of interpretation. It follows that so me maps became the instruments of empire, the tools imperial