Spanish Geography

If one wants to understand the origins of Massachusetts Bay Colony, one looks at East Anglia on the eastern English coast. If one wants to understand the sources for the American south, one looks to the west of Bristol. It does no good to study the midlands.

Likewise, if one wants to understand the origins of Santa Cruz, one doesn’t bother with Madrid or Seville or Barcelona. One looks at Estremadura in Spain and Zacatecas in México. The first was home to Hernán Cortés, conqueror of the Aztecs in 1520. The other was founded by Cristóbal Oñate and two other Basques in the 1540s.

Today, Estremadura is divided into two provinces, Cáceres in the north, Badajoz to the south. The one includes the towns of Guadalupe and Trujillo. The other has Albuquerque, Herrera del Duque, and Talavera la Real.

The founders of Zacatecas also used familiar names. Francisco de Ibarra called the area Nueva Vizcaya, after one of the three modern Basque provinces, Biscay. The others are Álava and Gipuzkoa.

Spain sits on a peninsula surrounded by the Mediterranean on the east, the Atlantic on the west, the Bay of Biscay on the north, and the Straits of Gibralter on the south. It’s dominated by the westward sloping Meseta Central of Castile. Today, the plateau is ringed by the Sistema Ibérico to the northeast, the Cordillera Cantabrica to the northwest, and the Sistema Penibético of the Betic range to the southeast.

The Iberian mountains contain the headwaters of the west flowing rivers, the Duero, the Tagus and the Guadiana. The Ebro flows east. The Sistema Central range separates the Duero from the Tagus, and Estremadura from Castile and León to the north. The mountains continue into Portugal where Serra da Estrela defines the western boundary of the Estremaduran geographic province north of the Tagus.

Below the Tagus, Serra d’Ossa defines the southern part of the western boundary in Portugal. Sierra Moreno divides the Guadiana from the Guadalquivir and Estremadura from the lands controlled by the Moors in Spain.

Notes:
Bas de Jong, "Topographical map of Spain," Wikipedia Commons.