Spain & Portugal

Antique Maps of Spain and Portugal — The Iberian Peninsula

This category brings together original antique maps of Spain and Portugal, spanning four centuries of European cartographic engagement with the Iberian Peninsula from the landmark publications of the 16th century through to the detailed surveys of the 19th. These works document the geography of two nations whose global significance — as the pioneer colonial powers of the age of exploration and as the dominant maritime empires of the 15th and 16th centuries — made their territorial cartography a matter of primary importance to European geographic publishers and their audiences.

The Iberian Peninsula occupies a unique place in the history of cartography. Spain and Portugal were not only the subjects of maps produced by European cartographic publishers, but the originators of the age of exploration that generated the geographic discoveries those publishers sought to document. Portuguese navigators mapped the African coast, the Indian Ocean route to Asia and the coasts of Brazil; Spanish conquistadors and explorers documented the Americas and the Pacific in charts and maps that were jealously guarded as state secrets before eventually finding their way into the published geographic record. The maps of the Iberian Peninsula itself therefore exist in a cartographic context defined by the global voyages that Iberian sailors and scholars had initiated.

The major Dutch and Flemish publishers of the 16th and 17th centuries — Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, Blaeu and Jansson — produced maps of Spain and Portugal of exceptional quality, incorporating the detailed geographic knowledge accumulated through decades of maritime contact with the peninsula’s ports and coastlines. These maps, with their elaborate decorative elements and their careful rendering of regional geography, represent the Spanish and Portuguese peninsulas at a moment of political and commercial significance that gave geographic accuracy both scientific and strategic value.

Regional maps of the Spanish kingdoms — Castile, Aragon, Andalusia, Catalonia, Valencia and their counterparts — appear alongside maps of the peninsula as a whole, documenting the component territories of the Spanish monarchy with a geographic specificity useful for both administrative and commercial purposes. Maps of Portugal, though fewer in number, document the kingdom’s geography and its relationship to the broader Iberian context with comparable cartographic care.

Antique maps of Spain and Portugal are collected for their geographic interest, their connection to the great age of Iberian maritime exploration, and the decorative quality that characterises the finest examples of the Dutch and Flemish cartographic tradition.