during the last hours Much has been said about what is called “Google Maps of the History of Spain”., something that at first glance sounds somewhere between mysterious and interesting. Disturbing in the first place, because of course many of us are used to using Google Maps to get directions to help us get from point A to point B, and to find all kinds of businesses, from restaurants to hardware stores, which is something that is difficult. they relate to the Middle Ages, the Golden Age, etc.

Maps are, in principle, a spatial representation, and from their side we tend to associate (of course logically) history with time, not with space. However, we must remember something obvious, that events always take place in a certain place, so representing them on a map makes a lot of sense, even if it does not allow us to trace the best path from the painting. screens in the back choir of Burgos Cathedral for the departure, from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, of the expedition that will take Magellan and Elcano to circumnavigate our planet for the first time in human history.

The geographic representation of history is a model that I have always found interesting, both for representing specific moments and events enough to trace a geographical chronology of events of greater depth, such as the development of two confronting fronts in a war conflict. This second type of representation is more common, as we have seen it for decades in documentaries and other films, but still, the geographical location of specific events is usually limited to marking the place, text or voice, rather than showing it on a map.

The Historia Hispánica portal, because that is the real name of Google Maps of the history of Spain, and which was introduced yesterday, emphasizes the importance of geographical representation of events. Commissioned by the Royal Academy of History, this is how the entity itself defines its content:

“Hispanic History shows the geolocation of events and figures of our history with some 150,000 geographic references. The largest Hispanic history information to date.

These global geolocations indicate:

• places of birth, death and activities more than 50,000 characters and
• location more than 20,000 events our history
• from 1,350,000 BC to the present
• with special attention to all the territories that were part of the Spanish administration

Four specific thesauri (subject, chronological, geographical and thematic) are added more than 10,000 descriptors which work in different search modalities.

All content is linked together through an exhaustive system of direct and indirect connections that create a network of relationships that have not yet been revealed and that contextualize events and historical figures synchronically and diachronically.’

With free and open access, Google Maps on the history of Spain (which no longer belongs to Google, but to the RAH, although it uses Google Maps), is a pioneering initiative in this sense, an example of innovation in the service of culture and history, and which, in addition to facilitating access to the information makes it much more enjoyable because its very format invites us to explore the map and especially those places that are a reference in our lives, perhaps allowing us to discover the historical events that took place in those places.

Navigating these Google Maps of the history of Spain is very simple, whether we use the map or choose to use it guided search, timelines and other tools which can be found at the bottom of the page. Links to births and deaths are listed directly in the file that appears when you click on each location, although the events show the date, which is a link we’ll have to click to get to the event file they refer to.