Familiar Spanish Travels [with Biographical Introduction]

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Lined with palm trees, rosemary bushes, and other tropical vegetation, the southeastern Mediterranean coast and the Balearic Islands enjoy a gentle climate, drawing millions of visitors and retirees, especially from northern Europe. The Andalusian capital of Sevilla Seville is famed for its musical culture and traditional folkways; the Catalonian capital of Barcelona for its secular architecture and maritime industry; and the national capital of Madrid for its winding streets, its museums and bookstores, and its around-the-clock lifestyle. It comes from the first sob and the first kiss.

In , the year the last of the Moorish rulers were expelled from Spain , ships under the command of Christopher Columbus reached America. For years afterward, Spanish explorers and conquerors traveled the world, claiming huge territories for the Spanish crown, a succession of Castilian, Aragonese, Habsburg , and Bourbon rulers.

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For generations Spain was arguably the richest country in the world, and certainly the most far-flung. The country has been ruled since then by a succession of elected governments, some socialist, some conservative , but all devoted to democracy. Spain is bordered to the west by Portugal; to the northeast it borders France , from which it is separated by the tiny principality of Andorra and by the great wall of the Pyrenees Mountains. Elsewhere the country is bounded by water: Spain accounts for five-sixths of the Iberian Peninsula, the roughly quadrilateral southwestern tip of Europe that separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean.

Most of Spain comprises a large plateau the Meseta Central divided by a mountain range, the Central Sierra Sistema Central , which trends west-southwest to east-northeast. Several mountains border the plateau: There are two major depressions, that of the Ebro River in the northeast and that of the Guadalquivir River in the southwest.

Along the Mediterranean seaboard there are coastal plains, some with lagoons e. Offshore in the Mediterranean, the Balearic Islands are an unsubmerged portion of the Baetic Cordillera. The Canary Islands in the Atlantic are of volcanic origin and contain the highest peak on Spanish territory, Teide Peak , which rises to 12, feet 3, metres on the island of Tenerife.

Spain has some of the oldest as well as some of the youngest rocks of Europe. The entire western half of Iberia , with the exception of the extreme south, is composed of ancient Hercynian rocks; geologists refer to this Hercynian block as the Meseta Central. It constitutes a relatively stable platform around which younger sediments accumulated, especially on the Mediterranean side. In due course these sediments were pushed by major earth movements into mountain ranges.

The term meseta is also used by geographers and local toponymy to designate the dominating relief unit of central Iberia. As a result, the Meseta Central defined by relief is subdivided by geology into a crystalline west granites and gneisses and a sedimentary east mainly clays and limestones. Its relief is more diverse, however, owing to heavy faulting and warping caused by volcanic activity around the Calatrava Plain and to two complex river systems the Guadiana and the Tagus separated by mountains.

Its southern plains rise gradually to the Sierra Morena. The southeastern side of this range drops almost vertically by more than 3, feet 1, metres to the Guadalquivir depression. Dividing the northern and southern Mesetas are the Central Sierras, one of the outstanding features of the Iberian massif. In contrast, the granitic Galician mountains, at the northwestern end of the Hercynian block, have an average elevation of only 1, feet metres , decreasing toward the deeply indented ria coast of the Atlantic seaboard.

Part of Alpine Europe, the Pyrenees form a massive mountain range that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Bay of Biscay, a distance of some miles km. The range comprises a series of parallel zones: The highest peaks, formed from a core of ancient crystalline rocks, are found in the central Pyrenees—notably Aneto Peak at 11, feet 3, metres —but those of the west, including Anie Peak at 8, feet 2, metres , are not much lower. The mountains fall steeply on the northern side but descend in terraces to the Ebro River trough in the south.

The outer zones of the Pyrenees are composed of sedimentary rocks. Relief on the nearly horizontal sedimentary strata of the Ebro depression is mostly plain or plateau, except at the eastern end where the Ebro River penetrates the mountains to reach the Mediterranean Sea. A series of sierras trending northwest-southeast forms the Iberian Cordillera, which separates the Ebro depression from the Meseta and reaches its highest elevation with Moncayo Peak at 7, feet 2, metres. In the southeast the Iberian Cordillera links with the Baetic Cordillera , also a result of Alpine earth movements.

Christopher, Bartolomeo, and Diego.

Bobadilla reported to Spain that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola. The page report, found in in the national archive in the Spanish city of Simancas , contains testimonies from 23 people, including both enemies and supporters of Columbus, about the treatment of colonial subjects by Columbus and his brothers during his seven-year rule. According to the report, Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery.

Testimony recorded in the report stated that Columbus congratulated his brother Bartolomeo on "defending the family" when the latter ordered a woman paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue cut out for suggesting that Columbus was of lowly birth. Because of their gross misgovernance, Columbus and his brothers were arrested and imprisoned upon their return to Spain from the third voyage. They lingered in jail for six weeks before King Ferdinand ordered their release. Not long after, the king and queen summoned the Columbus brothers to the Alhambra palace in Granada.

There, the royal couple heard the brothers' pleas; restored their freedom and wealth; and, after much persuasion, agreed to fund Columbus's fourth voyage. But the door was firmly shut on Columbus's role as governor. Columbus had always claimed the conversion of non-believers as one reason for his explorations, but he grew increasingly religious in his later years.

Probably with the assistance of his son Diego and his friend the Carthusian monk Gaspar Gorricio, Columbus produced two books during his later years: In his later years, Columbus demanded that the Spanish Crown give him 10 percent of all profits made in the new lands, as stipulated in the Capitulations of Santa Fe.

Because he had been relieved of his duties as governor, the crown did not feel bound by that contract and his demands were rejected. After his death, his heirs sued the Crown for a part of the profits from trade with America, as well as other rewards. This led to a protracted series of legal disputes known as the pleitos colombinos "Columbian lawsuits". During a violent storm on his first return voyage, Columbus, then 41, suffered an attack of what was believed at the time to be gout.

In subsequent years, he was plagued with what was thought to be influenza and other fevers, bleeding from the eyes, and prolonged attacks of gout. The suspected attacks increased in duration and severity, sometimes leaving Columbus bedridden for months at a time, and culminated in his death 14 years later. Based on Columbus's lifestyle and the described symptoms, modern doctors suspect that he suffered from reactive arthritis , rather than gout.

Arnett, a rheumatologist and professor of internal medicine, pathology and laboratory medicine the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. On 20 May , aged probably 54, Columbus died in Valladolid , Spain. In , the remains were transferred to Colonial Santo Domingo , in the present-day Dominican Republic.

In , when France took over the entire island of Hispaniola , Columbus's remains were moved to Havana , Cuba. After Cuba became independent following the Spanish—American War in , the remains were moved back to Spain, to the Cathedral of Seville , [92] where they were placed on an elaborate catafalque. However, a lead box bearing an inscription identifying "Don Christopher Columbus" and containing bone fragments and a bullet was discovered at Santo Domingo in Initial observations suggested that the bones did not appear to belong to somebody with the physique or age at death associated with Columbus.

The mitochondrial DNA fragments matched corresponding DNA from Columbus's brother, giving support that both individuals had shared the same mother. Such evidence, together with anthropologic and historic analyses, led the researchers to conclude that the remains found in Seville belonged to Christopher Columbus. The anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Americas is usually observed on 12 October in Spain and throughout the Americas, except Canada. The World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, , commemorated the th anniversary of the landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas.

The United States Postal Service participated in the celebration issuing the first US commemorative postage stamps , a series of 16 postage issues called the Columbian Issue depicting Columbus, Queen Isabella and others in the various stages of his several voyages. The issues range in value from the 1-cent to the 5-dollar denominations. Wanamaker originally introduced the idea of issuing the nation's first commemorative stamp to Harrison, the Congress and the U.

A total of two billion stamps were issued for all the Columbian denominations, and 72 percent of these were the two-cent stamps, "Landing of Columbus", which paid the first-class rate for domestic mail at the time. In , a second Columbian issue was released that was identical to the first to commemorate the th anniversary, except for the date in the upper right hand corner of each stamp.

These issues were made from the original dies of which the first engraved issues of were produced. The United States issued the series jointly for the first time with three other countries, Italy in lire, Portugal in escudos and Spain in pesetas. Columbus's voyages are considered some of the most important events in world history, kickstarting modern globalism and resulting in major demographic, commercial, economic, social, and political changes.

There was a massive exchange of animals, plants, fungi, diseases, technologies, mineral wealth and ideas. Spanish is now one the most widely spoken languages in the world. Roman Catholicism is the most widely practiced religion in Latin America. The tomato was one of the crops made global by the Columbian exchange. Smallpox , one of the deadliest diseases brought to the New World. The horse was no longer present in North America until the Columbian exchange.

Large numbers of slaves were brought to the New World between and the mind 19th century. Roughly 3, metric tons of silver was imported by Spain from the Americas. Though Christopher Columbus came to be considered the discoverer of America in US and European popular culture, his historical legacy is more nuanced. America was discovered and populated by its indigenous population.

Columbus was not even the first European to reach its shores, having been preceded by Erik the Red in 10th-century Greenland and Leif Erikson in 11th-century Vinland at L'Anse aux Meadows. Thus, Columbus was able to initiate the enduring association between the Earth's two major landmasses and their inhabitants. Historians have traditionally argued that Columbus remained convinced to the very end that his journeys had been along the east coast of Asia, [] but writer Kirkpatrick Sale argues that a document in the Book of Privileges indicates Columbus knew he found a new continent.

The term " pre-Columbian " is usually used to refer to the peoples and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors. Columbus is often credited with refuting a prevalent belief in a flat Earth. However, this legacy is a popular misconception. To the contrary, the spherical shape of the Earth had been known to scholars since antiquity , and was common knowledge among sailors. Coincidentally, the oldest surviving globe of the Earth, the Erdapfel , was made in just before Columbus's return to Europe.

Christopher Columbus: A Brief Biography

As such it contains no sign of the Americas and yet demonstrates the common belief in a spherical Earth. The scholar Amerigo Vespucci , who sailed to America in the years following Columbus's first voyage, was the first to speculate that the land was not part of Asia but in fact constituted some wholly new continent previously unknown to Eurasians. According to Paul Lunde, "The preoccupation of European courts with the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the East partly explains their relative lack of interest in Columbus's discoveries in the West.

Historically, the English had downplayed Columbus and emphasized the role of the Venetian John Cabot as a pioneer explorer, but for the emerging United States, Cabot made for a poor national hero. Veneration of Columbus in America dates back to colonial times. The name Columbia for "America" first appeared in a weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament. Columbus's name was given to the federal capital of the United States District of Columbia , the capital cities of two U.

Outside the United States the name was used in for the Gran Colombia , a precursor of the modern Republic of Colombia. A candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church in , celebration of Columbus's legacy perhaps reached a zenith in with the th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas. In , descendants of Columbus undertook to dismantle the Columbus family chapel in Spain and move it to Boalsburg near State College , Pennsylvania, where it may now be visited by the public.

Since the late 20th century, historians have criticized Columbus for initiating colonization and for abuse of natives.

Columbus required the natives to pay tribute in gold and cotton. The natives had no acquired immunity to these new diseases and suffered high fatalities. There is also documentation that they were overworked. The historian Howard Zinn writes that Columbus started what developed as a massive slave trade; in his men captured in a single raid Arawak men, women, and children.

When Columbus shipped of the slaves to Spain, 40 percent died en route. Loewen asserts that "Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves — about five thousand — than any other individual He ordered all natives over the age of thirteen to pay a specified amount one hawk's bell full of gold powder every three months. Natives who brought this amount to the Spanish were given a copper token to hang around their necks. The Spanish amputated the hands of natives without tokens, and left them to bleed to death.

During his brief reign Columbus was reported to have executed Spanish colonists for minor crimes as well as use dismemberment as another form of punishment. Columbus's soldiers killed and enslaved with impunity at every landing. When Columbus fell ill in , "what little restraint he had maintained over his men disappeared as he went through a lengthy period of recuperation.

The troops went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives, trying to force them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined treasure-houses of gold. Upon his recovery, Columbus organized his troops' efforts, forming a squadron of several hundred heavily armed men and more than twenty attack dogs. The men tore across the land, killing thousands of sick and unarmed natives. Soldiers would use their captives for sword practice, attempting to decapitate them or cut them in half with a single blow.

The Arawaks attempted to fight back against Columbus's men but lacked their armor, guns, swords, and horses. When taken prisoner, they were hanged or burned to death. Desperation led to mass suicides and infanticide among the natives. In just two years under Columbus's governorship more than half of the , Arawaks in Haiti were dead. Samuel Eliot Morison , a Harvard historian and author of a multivolume biography on Columbus writes, "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide. However some of these accounts may be part of Black Legend, [] [] [] while others challenge the genocide narrative.

Indirect evidence suggests that some serious illness may have arrived with the colonists who accompanied Columbus's second expedition in By the end of , disease and famine had claimed two-thirds of the Spanish settlers. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds.

Mann wrote "It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades. Some historians have taken the position that while brutal, Columbus was simply a product of his times and being a figure of the 15th century should not be judged by the morality of the 20th-century.

Although an abundance of artwork involving Christopher Columbus exists, no authentic contemporary portrait has been found. Loewen , author of Lies My Teacher Told Me , believes the various posthumous portraits have no historical value. At the World's Columbian Exposition , 71 alleged portraits of Columbus were displayed; most did not match contemporary descriptions. Accounts consistently describe Columbus as a large and physically strong man of some six feet 1.

The most iconic image of Columbus is a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo , which has been reproduced in many textbooks. It agrees with descriptions of Columbus in that it shows a large man with auburn hair, but the painting dates from and cannot, therefore, have been painted from life. Furthermore, the inscription identifying the subject as Columbus was probably added later, and the face shown differs from other images, including that of the "Virgin of the Navigators. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the explorer.

For other uses, see Christopher Columbus disambiguation. For other uses, see Cristoforo Colombo disambiguation. Posthumous portrait of Christopher Columbus by Sebastiano del Piombo , There are no known authentic portraits of Columbus. Further information on Columbus's birthplace and family background: Origin theories of Christopher Columbus.

Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Columbian Exchange and List of places named for Christopher Columbus.

The two main early biographies of Columbus have been taken as literal truth by hundreds of writers, in large part because they were written by individuals closely connected to Columbus or his writings. Both biographies have serious shortcomings as evidence.

Soldier and slave

Portraits may be seen here: The youngest brother of Christopher Columbus ". New International Encyclopedia 1st ed. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Columbus The Four Voyages, — Ra Stamparia de Tarigo. Retrieved 2 February Christopher Columbus was Portuguese. Express Printers, Fall River. Archived from the original on 23 March Tirado, PhD Professor History. The Wife of Columbus: Simon and Schuster Retrieved 29 July The Christian Century in Japan: University of California Press. Mutiny and Its Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery.

Archived from the original on 27 June Popular Myths about America from Columbus to Clinton. Inventing the Flat Earth. Cosmos ; the mean circumference of the Earth is 40, The Life of Christopher Columbus , Boston: Reissued by the Morison Press, Archived from the original on 7 March Retrieved 18 April Archived from the original on 29 October Retrieved 10 April Retrieved 12 October Oxford University Press, online edition Encyclopedia of North American Indians.

The Color of Words: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends.

Miguel de Cervantes

A People's History of the United States. Or "these people are very simple as regards the use of arms … for with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them. Retrieved 24 January The Journal of Christopher Columbus. University of Oklahoma Press , — Dental Studies Give Clues. Cervantes included some of his dramas among the works he was most satisfied with.

It is believed that he above all wanted to be a dramatist, to see his plays reach fruition. He thought that if only people with standing would view his works, they would see what he had to offer; the evidence is so strong for this that, "In all probability he would have given all the success of 'Don Quixote,' nay, would have seen every copy of 'Don Quixote' burned in the Plaza Mayor, for one such success as Lope de Vega was enjoying on an average once a week.

The novel, initially uncelebrated by its author, was strung together and offered to its audience as a literary trifle whose object was merely to relieve boredom or act as a springboard towards other ideas, despite the profound legacy it would later develop. It is a story of local resistance against the foreign Roman invader, intended as a patriotic work. Cervantes invented, along with the subject of his piece, a peculiar style of tragic composition; he had no knowledge of Aristotle's now-famous lectures on tragedy.

His object was to produce a piece full of tragic situations, combined with the charm of the marvellous. In order to accomplish this goal, Cervantes relied heavily on allegory and on mythological elements. The tragedy is written in conformity with no rules, save those which the author prescribed for himself, for he felt no inclination to imitate the Greek forms.

Miguel de Cervantes | Spanish writer | bahana-line.com

The play is divided into four acts, jornadas ; and no chorus is introduced. During his life, Cervantes was primarily known as a writer of comedy, which was how Don Quixote Part I was viewed in his day. He then faded into semi-obscurity.

Cervantes' novel Don Quixote has had a tremendous influence on the development of prose fiction. It has been translated into all major languages and has appeared in editions. The first translation was in English, made by Thomas Shelton in Part I only [62] , but not published until Shelton renders some Spanish idioms into English so literally that they sound nonsensical when translated.

In the original Spanish, for instance, a phrase such as una altura de quince dedos , which makes perfect sense in Spanish, would mean "fifteen inches high" in English, but a translator who renders it too literally would translate it as "fifteen fingers high". Carlos Fuentes raised the possibility that Cervantes and Shakespeare were the same person, in the sense that Homer , Dante , Defoe , Dickens , Balzac , and Joyce are all the same writer whose spirit wanders through the centuries.

Sigmund Freud was greatly influenced by " El coloquio de los perros ", which has been called the origin of psychoanalysis. In it, only one character tells his story; the other listens, occasionally making comments. At the center of the dog's story is a sexual event. The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes , the largest digital archive of Spanish-language historical and literary works in the world, is named after the author.

Don Quixote ' s influence can be seen in the work of:. They chose, voluntarily or as a result of pressure, which was sometimes severe, to convert to Christianity. Modern scholars, especially in the United States, where Castro taught and had disciples, have suggested that his ancestors, before , were Jews, and that he was therefore a New Christian or the same thing Converso , a group subject to much discrimination in the Spain of his day.

The theory rests almost exclusively on circumstantial evidence, but would explain some mysteries of Cervantes' life. The oil painting Retrato de un caballero desconocido Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman , painted by El Greco in Toledo between and , and on display at the Museo del Prado , has also been cited as a possible portrait of Cervantes, based on the fact that he was living near Toledo in and that he knew people within El Greco's circle of friends.

This person whom you see here, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose, and silvery beard that twenty years ago was golden, large moustaches, a small mouth, teeth not much to speak of, for he has but six, in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other, a figure midway between the two extremes, neither tall nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very lightfooted: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For other uses, see Cervantes disambiguation. This name uses Spanish naming customs: It has not been authenticated, and no authenticated visual image exists. This section is written like a personal reflection or opinion essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings about a topic. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. March Learn how and when to remove this template message.

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. The Siege of Numantia.

Civil servant and writer

Translated by Walter K. Retrieved 1 January La novela ejemplar de los retratos de Cervantes in Spanish. Engines of Our Ingenuity. Retrieved 28 April — via UH. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary — via dictionary. Retrieved 9 August Retrieved 18 July Retrieved 3 January Archived from the original PDF on 3 October Retrieved 14 September Centro de Estudios Cervantinos. Retrieved 3 February Retrieved 27 June Retrieved 5 December Garden City, NY, , pp.

Enfermedad y muerte de Cervantes. Retrieved 18 March Calvo, Shakespeare and Cervantes in , Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. Archived PDF from the original on 3 March Retrieved 17 March Retrieved 11 June Cervantes' Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: A Study of Genre. Retrieved 16 November A reassessment of the dating problem, by A. Archived from the original on 1 July Retrieved 19 March Wiley Hugh Wiley , — Grove's Dictionaries of Music.

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