Queen Letizia of Spain
Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano is the current Queen of Spain as the wife of King Felipe VI. Letizia Ortiz came from a middle-class family and worked as a journalist for ABC and EFE before becoming a news anchor at CNN+ and Televisión Española. In 2003, it was announced that she was engaged to marry Felipe Prince of Asturias and heir apparent to the Spanish throne, they married in 2004. Their daughters and Sofía, were born in 2005 and 2007 respectively; as Princess of Asturias, Letizia represented her father-in-law, King Juan Carlos, in Spain and abroad. On her father-in-law's abdication in 2014, Felipe and Letizia became Queen of Spain. Letizia was born in Asturias, to a middle-class family, she is the eldest daughter of Jesús José Ortiz Álvarez, a journalist, his first wife, María de la Paloma Rocasolano Rodríguez, a registered nurse and hospital union representative. She has two younger sisters, Telma and Érika, whose death was reported by press as due to an intentional prescription drug overdose, her parents divorced in 1999 and her father remarried in Madrid on 18 March 2004 to fellow journalist Ana Togores.
Letizia's paternal grandparents were a commercial employee at Olivetti. Her maternal grandfather was Francisco Julio Rocasolano Camacho, a mechanic and cab driver in Madrid for over 20 years, of French and Occitan origin. Letizia's maternal grandmother, Enriqueta Rodriguez Figueredo was born in the Philippines to Spanish parents. British genealogists have provided evidence that through her mother's Rocasolano lineage, Letizia descends from Astorg Roquesoulane and her coat-of-arms incorporates the arms of the Rocasolano family. Reports have suggested – and remain unproven – that on her paternal grandfather's side, Letizia is a descendant of an untitled family descended from medieval nobility who served as Constables of Castile. Letizia attended La Gesta School in Oviedo, before her family moved to Rivas-Vaciamadrid near Madrid, where she attended high school at the Ramiro de Maeztu High School, she completed a bachelor's degree in journalism, at the Complutense University of Madrid, as well as a master's degree in audiovisual journalism at the Institute for Studies in Audiovisual Journalism.
During her studies, Letizia worked for the Asturian daily newspaper La Nueva España and for the newspaper ABC and the news agency EFE. After completing her masters degree, she travelled to Guadalajara, working at the newspaper Siglo 21 and was working on her PhD. After returning to Spain, she worked for the Spanish version of the economic channel Bloomberg before moving to the news network CNN+. In 2000, she moved to TVE. In 2002, she anchored the weekly news report programme Informe Semanal and the daily morning news programme Telediario Matinal on TVE 1. In August 2003, a few months before her engagement to Felipe, Letizia was promoted to anchor of the TVE daily evening news programme Telediario 2, the most viewed newscast in Spain. In 2000, Letizia reported from Washington, D. C. on the presidential elections. In September 2001, she broadcast live from Ground Zero following the 9/11 attacks in New York and in 2003, she filed reports from Iraq following the war. In 2002 she sent several reports from Galicia in northern Spain following the ecological disaster when the oil tanker Prestige sank.
Letizia married Alonso Guerrero Pérez, a writer and a high-school literature teacher, on 7 August 1998, in a simple civil ceremony at Almendralejo, in Badajoz, after a 10-year courtship. The marriage was dissolved by divorce in 1999. On 1 November 2003, to the surprise of many, the Royal Household announced Letizia's engagement to Felipe Prince of Asturias. Afterwards, she moved to live in a wing of the Zarzuela Palace until the day of her wedding; the Prince of Asturias had proposed to her with a 16-baguette diamond engagement ring with a white gold trim. She marked the occasion by giving him a classic book; the wedding took place on 22 May 2004 in the Cathedral Santa María la Real de la Almudena in Madrid. It was the first royal wedding in this cathedral, it had been nearly a century since the capital celebrated a royal wedding, as the prince's parents married in Athens, his sisters, Infanta Elena and Infanta Cristina, married in Seville and Barcelona respectively. Letizia's bridal gown was designed by Spanish fashion designer Manuel Pertegaz, her bridal shoes by Pura López.
As Letizia's previous marriage involved only a civil ceremony, the Catholic Church does not consider it canonically valid and therefore did not require an annulment to proceed with a Catholic marriage to the Prince of Asturias. Letizia and Felipe have two daughters: Leonor, Princess of Asturias, born on 31 October 2005, they were born at Ruber International Hospital in Madrid. Princess Letizia joined in the duties of her husband and traveled extensively through Spain representing her father-in-law, they represented Spain in other countries: she has traveled along with her husband to Jordan, Hungary, the Dominican Republic, the United States of America, Brazil, Sweden, Japan and Portugal. She greeted international dignitaries, along with other members of the royal family. Letizia
Spain
Spain the Kingdom of Spain, is a country located in Europe. Its continental European territory is situated on the Iberian Peninsula, its territory includes two archipelagoes: the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. The African enclaves of Ceuta, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera make Spain the only European country to have a physical border with an African country. Several small islands in the Alboran Sea are part of Spanish territory; the country's mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with Gibraltar. With an area of 505,990 km2, Spain is the largest country in Southern Europe, the second largest country in Western Europe and the European Union, the fourth largest country in the European continent. By population, Spain is the fifth in the European Union. Spain's capital and largest city is Madrid. Modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 35,000 years ago. Iberian cultures along with ancient Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian settlements developed on the peninsula until it came under Roman rule around 200 BCE, after which the region was named Hispania, based on the earlier Phoenician name Spn or Spania.
At the end of the Western Roman Empire the Germanic tribal confederations migrated from Central Europe, invaded the Iberian peninsula and established independent realms in its western provinces, including the Suebi and Vandals. The Visigoths would forcibly integrate all remaining independent territories in the peninsula, including Byzantine provinces, into the Kingdom of Toledo, which more or less unified politically and all the former Roman provinces or successor kingdoms of what was documented as Hispania. In the early eighth century the Visigothic Kingdom fell to the Moors of the Umayyad Islamic Caliphate, who arrived to rule most of the peninsula in the year 726, leaving only a handful of small Christian realms in the north and lasting up to seven centuries in the Kingdom of Granada; this led to many wars during a long reconquering period across the Iberian Peninsula, which led to the creation of the Kingdom of Leon, Kingdom of Castile, Kingdom of Aragon and Kingdom of Navarre as the main Christian kingdoms to face the invasion.
Following the Moorish conquest, Europeans began a gradual process of retaking the region known as the Reconquista, which by the late 15th century culminated in the emergence of Spain as a unified country under the Catholic Monarchs. Until Aragon had been an independent kingdom, which had expanded toward the eastern Mediterranean, incorporating Sicily and Naples, had competed with Genoa and Venice. In the early modern period, Spain became the world's first global empire and the most powerful country in the world, leaving a large cultural and linguistic legacy that includes more than 570 million Hispanophones, making Spanish the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese. During the Golden Age there were many advancements in the arts, with world-famous painters such as Diego Velázquez; the most famous Spanish literary work, Don Quixote, was published during the Golden Age. Spain hosts the world's third-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Spain is a secular parliamentary democracy and a parliamentary monarchy, with King Felipe VI as head of state.
It is a major developed country and a high income country, with the world's fourteenth largest economy by nominal GDP and sixteenth largest by purchasing power parity. It is a member of the United Nations, the European Union, the Eurozone, the Council of Europe, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the Union for the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Schengen Area, the World Trade Organization and many other international organisations. While not an official member, Spain has a "Permanent Invitation" to the G20 summits, participating in every summit, which makes Spain a de facto member of the group; the origins of the Roman name Hispania, from which the modern name España was derived, are uncertain due to inadequate evidence, although it is documented that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians referred to the region as Spania, therefore the most accepted etymology is a Semitic-Phoenician one.
Down the centuries there have been a number of accounts and hypotheses: The Renaissance scholar Antonio de Nebrija proposed that the word Hispania evolved from the Iberian word Hispalis, meaning "city of the western world". Jesús Luis Cunchillos argues that the root of the term span is the Phoenician word spy, meaning "to forge metals". Therefore, i-spn-ya would mean "the land where metals are forged", it may be a derivation of the Phoenician I-Shpania, meaning "island of rabbits", "land of rabbits" or "edge", a reference to Spain's location at the end of the Mediterranean. The word in question means "Hyrax" due to Phoenicians confusing the two animals. Hispania may derive from the poetic use of the term Hesperia, reflecting the Greek perception of Italy as a "western land" or "land of the setting sun" (Hesperia
Water wheel
A water wheel is a machine for converting the energy of flowing or falling water into useful forms of power in a watermill. A water wheel consists of a wheel, with a number of blades or buckets arranged on the outside rim forming the driving surface. Water wheels were still in commercial use well into the 20th century but they are no longer in common use. Uses included milling flour in gristmills, grinding wood into pulp for papermaking, hammering wrought iron, ore crushing and pounding fiber for use in the manufacture of cloth; some water wheels are fed by water from a mill pond, formed when a flowing stream is dammed. A channel for the water flowing to or from a water wheel is called a mill race; the race bringing water from the mill pond to the water wheel is a headrace. In the mid to late 18th century John Smeaton's scientific investigation of the water wheel led to significant increases in efficiency supplying much needed power for the Industrial Revolution. Water wheels began being displaced by the smaller, less expensive and more efficient turbine, developed by Benoît Fourneyron, beginning with his first model in 1827.
Turbines are capable of handling high heads, or elevations, that exceed the capability of practical-sized waterwheels. The main difficulty of water wheels is their dependence on flowing water, which limits where they can be located. Modern hydroelectric dams can be viewed as the descendants of the water wheel, as they too take advantage of the movement of water downhill. Water wheels come in two basic designs: a horizontal wheel with a vertical axle; the latter can be subdivided according to where the water hits the wheel into backshot overshot, breastshot and stream-wheels. The term undershot can refer to any wheel where the water passes under the wheel but it implies that the water entry is low on the wheel. Most water wheels in the United Kingdom and the United States are vertical wheels rotating about a horizontal axle, but in the Scottish highlands and parts of Southern Europe mills had a horizontal wheel. Overshot and backshot water wheels are used where the available height difference is more than a couple of meters.
Breastshot wheels are more suited to large flows with a moderate head. Undershot and stream wheel use large flows at no head. There is an associated millpond, a reservoir for storing water and hence energy until it is needed. Larger heads store more potential energy for the same amount of water so the reservoirs for overshot and backshot wheels tend to be smaller than for breast shot wheels. Overshot and pitchback water wheels are suitable where there is a small stream with a height difference of more than 2 meters in association with a small reservoir. Breastshot and undershot wheels can be used on high volume flows with large reservoirs. A horizontal wheel with a vertical axle. Called a tub wheel, Norse mill or Greek mill, the horizontal wheel is a primitive and inefficient form of the modern turbine; however if it delivers the required power the efficiency is of secondary importance. It is mounted inside a mill building below the working floor. A jet of water is directed on to the paddles of the water wheel.
This is a simple system without gearing so that the vertical axle of the water wheel becomes the drive spindle of the mill. The earliest known reference to water wheels dates to about 400 BCE, the earliest horizontal axis wheels date to about 200 BCE, so vertical axis mills pre-date horizontal axis mills by about two centuries. A stream wheel is a vertically mounted water wheel, rotated by the water in a water course striking paddles or blades at the bottom of the wheel; this type of water wheel is the oldest type of horizontal axis wheel. They are known as free surface wheels because the water is not constrained by millraces or wheel pit. Stream wheels are cheaper and simpler to build, have less of an environmental impact, than other type of wheel, they do not constitute a major change of the river. Their disadvantages are their low efficiency, which means that they generate less power and can only be used where the flow rate is sufficient. A typical flat board undershot wheel uses about 20 percent of the energy in the flow of water striking the wheel as measured by English civil engineer John Smeaton in the 18th century.
More modern wheels have higher efficiencies. Stream wheels gain little or no advantage from head, a difference in water level. Stream wheels mounted on floating platforms are referred to as ship wheels and the mill as a ship mill; the earliest were constructed by the Byzantine general Belisarius during the siege of Rome in 537. They were sometimes mounted downstream from bridges where the flow restriction of the bridge piers increased the speed of the current, they were inefficient but major advances were made in the eighteenth century. An undershot wheel is a vertically mounted water wheel with a horizontal axle, rotated by the water from a low weir striking the wheel in the bottom quarter. Most of the energy gain comparatively little from the head, they are similar in design to stream wheels. The term undershot is sometimes used with related but different meanings: all wheels where the water passes under the wheel wheels where the water enters in the bottom quarter. Wheels where paddles are placed into the flow of a stream.
See stream above. This is the oldest type of vertical water wheel; the word breastshot is used in a variety o
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style that flourished in Europe during the High and Late Middle Ages. It was succeeded by Renaissance architecture. Originating in 12th-century France, it was used for cathedrals and churches, until the 16th century, its most prominent features included the use of the rib vault and the flying buttress, which allowed the weight of the roof to be counterbalanced by buttresses outside the building, giving greater height and more space for windows. Another important feature was the extensive use of stained glass, the rose window, to bring light and color to the interior. Another feature was the use of realistic statuary on the exterior over the portals, to illustrate biblical stories for the illiterate parishioners; these technologies had all existed in Romanesque architecture, but they were used in more innovative ways and more extensively in Gothic architecture to make buildings taller and stronger. The first notable example is considered to be the Abbey of Saint-Denis, near Paris, whose choir and facade were reconstructed with Gothic features.
The choir was completed in 1144. The style appeared in some civic architecture in northern Europe, notably in town halls and university buildings. A Gothic revival began in mid-18th-century England, spread through 19th century Europe and continued for ecclesiastical and university structures, into the 20th century. Gothic architecture was known during the period as opus francigenum, The term "Gothic architecture" originated in the 16th century, was very negative, suggesting barbaric. Giorgio Vasari used the term "barbarous German style" in his 1550 Lives of the Artists to describe what is now considered the Gothic style, in the introduction to the Lives he attributed various architectural features to "the Goths" whom he held responsible for destroying the ancient buildings after they conquered Rome, erecting new ones in this style; the Gothic style originated in the Ile-de-France region of northern France in the first half of the 12th century. A new dynasty of French Kings, the Capetians, had subdued the feudal lords, had become the most powerful rulers in France, with their capital in Paris.
They allied themselves with the bishops of the major cities of northern France, reduced the power of the feudal abbots and monasteries. Their rise coincided with an enormous growth of the population and prosperity of the cities of northern France; the Capetian Kings and their bishops wished to build new cathedrals as monuments of their power and religious faith. The church which served as the primary model for the style was the Abbey of St-Denis, which underwent reconstruction by the Abbot Suger, first in the choir and the facade, Suger was a close ally and biographer of the French King, Louis VII, a fervent Catholic and builder, the founder of the University of Paris. Suger remodeled the ambulatory of the Abbey, removed the enclosures that separated the chapels, replaced the existing structure with imposing pillars and rib vaults; this created higher and wider bays, into which he installed larger windows, which filled the end of the church with light. Soon afterwards he rebuilt the facade, adding three deep portals, each with a tympanum, an arch filled with sculpture illustrating biblical stories.
The new facade was flanked by two towers. He installed a small circular rose window over the central portal; this design became the prototype for a series of new French cathedrals. Sens Cathedral was the first Cathedral to be built in the new style. Other versions of the new style soon appeared in Noyon Cathedral; the Gothic style was adapted by some French monastic orders, notably the Cistercian order under Saint Bernard of Clairvaux It was used in an austere form without ornament at the new Cistercian Abbey of Fontenay and the church of Clairvaux Abbey, whose site is now occupied by a French prison. The new style was copied outside the Kingdom of France in the Duchy of Normandy. Early examples of Norman Gothic included Coutances Cathedral. Through the rule of the Angevin dynasty, the new style was introduced to England and spread from there to Low Countries, Spain, northern Italy and Sicily; the Gothic style did not replace the Romanesque everywhere in Europe. The Late Romanesque continued to flourish in the Holy Roman Empire under the Hohenstaufens and Rhineland.
From the end of the 12th century until the middle of the 13th century, the gothic style spread from the Île-de-France to appear in other cities of northern France. New structures in the style included Chartres Cathedral; the early type of rib vault used of Saint Denis and Notre Dame, with six parts, was modified to four parts, making it simpler and stronger. Amiens and Chartres were among the first to use the flying buttress. At Reims, the buttresses were given greater weight and strength by the addition of heavy stone pinnacles on top; these were decorated with statues of ange
Alange
Alange is a municipality located in the province of Badajoz, Spain. As of 2017 the municipality has a population of 1,891 inhabitants, it is home to Roman baths a medieval castle, located on a hill commanding the Matachel river. It was held by the Order of Santiago from the 1240s, was abandoned in 1550
Aceuchal
Aceuchal is a municipality located in the province of Badajoz, Spain. As of 2017 the municipality has a population of 5436 inhabitants. Media related to Aceuchal at Wikimedia Commons
Almendral
Almendral is a municipality located in the province of Badajoz, Spain. According to the 2004 census, the municipality has a population of 1352 inhabitants. From the earliest Iberian times, passing through the Celtic, Greek, Roman and Arab periods, until the middle of the 13th century, Extremadura suffered violent invasions, accusations of displacement of its first inhabitants and successive conquests that led to A state of instability and skepticism, to be projected into the character of its future inhabitants. In any case, the primitive character was profiling and acquiring strength and identity of its own over the centuries until it was possible to establish a regional idiosyncrasy that has led it to continue to the present day; the prehistoric essence of Lower Extremadura is linked to the various events that have been reported since the first Mediterranean invasions. According to the discoveries of ancient vestiges, it is conjectured that Almendral was populated by primitive tribes of Iberian race, since the territory between this town and Barcarrota, counts on one of the majors concentrations of megalithic tombs of the Province of Badajoz.
Possible seat since the Roman period, the Visigoths should have elevated it of superior category, since in its old site, place known like the hermitage of San Matías, have appeared a series of visigodas pieces of some archaeological value that are in the Museum Archaeological site of Badajoz and in the hermitage of Finibus Térrae. The present Almendral was founded by the Arabs, two kilometers from the old site of the church of San Matías, since the previous settlement would have been devastated by Portuguese forces when they ventured into Extremadura after the battle of Aljubarrota. In 1333, King Alfonso XI the Justiciero handed over the town of Almendral, with all its terms and rents, to Enrique Enríquez "el Mozo", lord of Villalba de los Barros and Justice mayor of the King's House, the great-grandson of Fernando III the Saint, King of Castile and Leon. Almendral was a village of Badajoz and was part of the Manor of Feria in the time of Gome Suárez de Figueroa. During the seventeenth century, like the other Extremadura populations near the Portuguese border, Almendral suffered from the ups and downs of the clashes between the two nations.
To the end of Francoist Spain the locality constitutes constitutional municipality in the region of Extremadura. From 1834 was integrated in the Judicial Party of Olivenza. 1 In the census of 1842 it had 480 homes and 1,670 neighbors
Spain
Extremadura
