Spanish cities in as much as they were initially conceived as the cartographic equivalent of badges of honor, emblems that Philip II could use to impress foreign visitors with the size, number and importance of the cities over which he exercised dominion.

Be that as it may, original intentions of, the publication of his Van den Wyngaerde�s drawings of Spanish cities served as a catalyst and awakened a new generation of Spanish scholars to the New Map History, to the symbolic importance of maps, as well the manner in which maps served as tools of empire and administration. Increased interest in cartographic materials soon contributed to the publication, long over-due, of guides to the maps housed in Spanish archives and libraries. It also contributed to the success of a series of seminars, organized under the auspices of the Institut Cartogr�fic de Catalunya, that helped introduce Spanish scholars to the methods and interpretative techniques of the New Map History. Meanwhile, growing interest in cartographic also resulted in the search for a new kind of cartographic images and eventually to the discovery of �lost� maps, that is, maps that had remained in manuscript and whose existence was largely remained unknown. One such discovery took place in the State Library of Austria, where two art historians, Felipe Pereda and Fernando Mar�as, chanced upon an important manuscript atlas of the Iberia peninsula that had been commissioned in the 1620s by Philip IV. Their discovery resulted in the important volume, El atlas del Rey Planeta (Nerea, Madrid, 2002). A second discovery of almost equal cartographic importance occurred in Stockholm, where Carlos Sanchez identified yet another �lost� seventeenth-century atlas, in this instance, the so-called Heliche Atlas consisting mainly of city plans and designs for fortresses meant to defend the frontiers of the Habsburg�s far-flung