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Before Highway Maps: Creating A Digital Research Infrastructure Based On Sixteenth-Century Iberian Places And Roads, Robert Hibberd, J. B. Owens

Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

It is frequently difficult to write a geographically-integrated history of Portugal and Spain prior to the late nineteenth century because researchers often lack a means by which to identify the locations of historical places on the basis of the geographic coordinates of their modern counterparts. This article presents a free, downloadable digital gazetteer, which the authors have founded on a 1546 traveler’s guide to 139 major routes in “Spain” (as the Iberian Peninsula was then known), in which the author, Juan Pedro Villuga, listed each stopping place along each route and indicated the approximate distance between each of them ...