The man who drew Spain well for the first time

Adolescence in the 19th century was wild.

Francisco Coello was born one day in the spring of 1822 in Jaén and at the age of 11 he was already a cadet in the King's Infantry Regiment.

At 13 he was a second lieutenant.

With just 17, he was fighting in the front line of fire in the civil war of the liberals against the Carlists.

And, at the age of 19, that young man who was already a veteran soldier received a titanic commission: to prepare the

.

His team, made up of more than fifty people, traveled the country on horseback for more than three decades, making astronomical observations and using trigonometry to accurately measure distances.

His was the first scientific map of Spain.

Coello is today a completely forgotten character.

Two hundred years after his birth, a traveling exhibition now rescues the result of his work: meticulous sketches, plans of the main Spanish cities and provincial maps at a scale of 1: 200,000, studded with statistics that are very striking today.

In the year 1860, according to the Coello

, 1,220 homicides were recorded in Spain, a country that then had a population of 15 million people.

The figure is shocking, because there are currently less than 300 homicides a year.

The Spanish population has tripled, but deadly crimes have been reduced by a quarter.

The exhibition can be visited until October 14 at the headquarters of the National Geographic Institute, in Madrid.

In the mid-nineteenth century, in the midst of the explosion of mining and railways, Spain was facing "a cartographic vacuum", in the words of the historian Fernando Olmedo, curator of the exhibition.

The Spanish relied on antiquated maps made more than half a century earlier by the royal geographer Tomás López, who collected outside information from here and there, without confirming it on the ground and accumulating errors.

A progressive politician, Pascual Madoz, began a monumental work in the 1840s, with instructive data on all the country's populations: the

.

Given the lack of precise maps to illustrate his work, Madoz commissioned them from the young Coello.

Draft of the map of Seville made by Francisco Coello and his team around 1869. Map Library of the Army Geographical Center

Geography was then, more than ever, a weapon of war.

Coello accompanied the French army in Algeria and Tunisia in 1844 and took note of their maps.

Upon his return, the Spanish geographer established a system of signs that included ideas that are predominant today, such as the representation of towns and cities with circles of different sizes depending on their category.

The exhibition includes spectacular handwritten drafts, showing the extreme thoroughness of Coello and his team.

A group of Spanish and French engravers transformed those sketches into commercial maps, which were sold by the thousands.

The first sheet of the

, dedicated to the province of Madrid, was published in 1847. The last map, that of Albacete, was completed in 1876, but it was never put up for sale.

After a colossal work of more than three decades, the

was incomplete.

The map of the province of Jaén, birthplace of Coello, was not even begun.

The urban plans are surprising, according to Olmedo, from the Institute of Statistics and Cartography of Andalusia.

Coello's team immortalized cities just before the great transformations of the end of the 19th century, before the industrial revolution and the demographic explosion that forced new neighborhoods to be built non-stop.

The map of Madrid, from 1848, shows a tiny town, in which there was only a huge olive grove where the Atocha train station stands today.

Map of Madrid drawn up by Coello in 1848 based on the work of previous authors. Institute of Giennenses Studies

The exhibition tiptoes through another facet of Coello, that of the promoter of the Spanish colonization of Africa.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the successive Spanish-American wars of independence had left Spain with hardly any territory in America.

The country then looked to Africa, where the French armies were already expanding.

The memory of the war against the invading Napoleonic troops (1808-1814) is still fresh, the fear of the time was that Spain would be trapped between two Frances: one north of the Pyrenees and the other south of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Coello proposed to establish a Spanish protectorate in Morocco and send peaceful expeditions to colonize central Africa.

The 54-year-old military geographer founded the Madrid Geographical Society, an entity that organized occupation expeditions, such as those sent in 1884 to Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara.

Coello wanted to conquer Morocco, "but not with arms, not to turn its inhabitants into serfs or disgruntled vassals, but through civilization, to make them worthy citizens of a great nation," in his own words.

The geographer proposed missions of engineers and professors to build roads and instruct the population “in the arts and sciences”, as documented by the geographer José Antonio Rodríguez in his book

(UAM, 1996).

The geographer Francisco Coello, photographed around 1875. Waléry / BNF

Coello imagined the Spanish settlers working side by side with the Moroccans, to extract the wealth from their fields and their mines.

“This is the conquest that we must carry out, this is the role that, in my opinion, Spain must play in that country.

With that, instead of preserving a hostile people, whom we have to fear or fight, we will have a people of brothers there that will continue to be united with us in the future as it has been in various periods of history”, stated Coello in 1884 at a meeting of the newly created Spanish Society of Africanists and Colonialists, also promoted by himself.

The exhibition emphasizes that the

Coello

Starting in 1870, the recently created Geographical Institute, directed by General Carlos Ibáñez, was in charge of making a national topographic map, much more detailed and with a scale of 1:50,000.

Coello died in 1898, precisely the year in which Spain lost its last colonies.

From then on, the memory of Coello's herculean work vanished, despite the fact that his prestige during his lifetime was such that, in 1891, he was appointed president of the Commission for the International Map of the World at a geographical congress in Switzerland.

In 1999, the topographical engineer José Martín López published the biography

, edited by the Ministry of Public Works, in which he denounced that he was "officially and systematically ignored", even "in bad faith".

Martín López believes that the Coello

—a private initiative with some state support— was buried in oblivion at the beginning of the 20th century by the National Geographic Institute itself, which preferred to promote its own maps.

Martín López, a nonagenarian retired professor from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, rebels against amnesia: “ Coello's

was the first scientific and total.

His work was definitive.”

The Spanish have forgotten it, but Coello was the first person to draw Spain well.

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