Provinces of Spain
Spain and its autonomous communities are divided into fifty provinces. Spain's provincial system was recognized in its 1978 constitution but its origin dates back to 1833. Ceuta and the Plazas de soberanía are not part of any provinces; the layout of Spain's provinces follows the pattern of the territorial division of the country carried out in 1833. The only major change of provincial borders since that time has been the subdivision of the Canary Islands into two provinces rather than one; the provinces served as transmission belts for policies enacted in Madrid, as Spain was a centralised state for most of its modern history. The importance of the provinces has declined since the adoption of the system of autonomous communities in the period of the Spanish transition to democracy, they remain electoral districts for national elections and as geographical references: for instance in postal addresses and telephone codes. A small town would be identified as being in, Valladolid province rather than the autonomous community of Castile and León.
The provinces were the "building-blocks". No province is divided between more than one of these communities. Most of the provinces—with the exception of Álava, Biscay, Guipúzcoa, Balearic Islands, La Rioja, Navarra — are named after their principal town. Only two capitals of autonomous communities — Mérida in Extremadura and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia — are not the capitals of provinces. Seven of the autonomous communities comprise no more than one province each: Asturias, Balearic Islands, Cantabria, La Rioja, Madrid and Navarra; these are sometimes referred to as "uniprovincial" communities. The table below lists the provinces of Spain. For each, the capital city is given, together with an indication of the autonomous community to which it belongs and a link to a list of municipalities in the province; the names of the provinces and their capitals are ordered alphabetically according to the form in which they appear in the main Wikipedia articles describing them. Unless otherwise indicated, their Spanish language names are the same.
List of Spanish provinces by population List of Spanish provinces by area Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces Autonomous communities of Spain Comarcas of Spain ISO 3166-2:ESGeneral: Political divisions of Spain Maps of the provinces of Spain Maps of Spain's Provinces List of municipalities of Spain listed by province from the Spanish INE
Rail transport
Rail transport is a means of transferring of passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails known as tracks. It is commonly referred to as train transport. In contrast to road transport, where vehicles run on a prepared flat surface, rail vehicles are directionally guided by the tracks on which they run. Tracks consist of steel rails, installed on ties and ballast, on which the rolling stock fitted with metal wheels, moves. Other variations are possible, such as slab track, where the rails are fastened to a concrete foundation resting on a prepared subsurface. Rolling stock in a rail transport system encounters lower frictional resistance than road vehicles, so passenger and freight cars can be coupled into longer trains; the operation is carried out by a railway company, providing transport between train stations or freight customer facilities. Power is provided by locomotives which either draw electric power from a railway electrification system or produce their own power by diesel engines.
Most tracks are accompanied by a signalling system. Railways are a safe land transport system. Railway transport is capable of high levels of passenger and cargo utilization and energy efficiency, but is less flexible and more capital-intensive than road transport, when lower traffic levels are considered; the oldest known, man/animal-hauled railways date back to the 6th century BC in Greece. Rail transport commenced in mid 16th century in Germany in the form of horse-powered funiculars and wagonways. Modern rail transport commenced with the British development of the steam locomotives in the early 19th century, thus the railway system in Great Britain is the oldest in the world. Built by George Stephenson and his son Robert's company Robert Stephenson and Company, the Locomotion No. 1 is the first steam locomotive to carry passengers on a public rail line, the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. George Stephenson built the first public inter-city railway line in the world to use only the steam locomotives all the time, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway which opened in 1830.
With steam engines, one could construct mainline railways, which were a key component of the Industrial Revolution. Railways reduced the costs of shipping, allowed for fewer lost goods, compared with water transport, which faced occasional sinking of ships; the change from canals to railways allowed for "national markets" in which prices varied little from city to city. The spread of the railway network and the use of railway timetables, led to the standardisation of time in Britain based on Greenwich Mean Time. Prior to this, major towns and cities varied their local time relative to GMT; the invention and development of the railway in the United Kingdom was one of the most important technological inventions of the 19th century. The world's first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863. In the 1880s, electrified trains were introduced, leading to electrification of tramways and rapid transit systems. Starting during the 1940s, the non-electrified railways in most countries had their steam locomotives replaced by diesel-electric locomotives, with the process being complete by the 2000s.
During the 1960s, electrified high-speed railway systems were introduced in Japan and in some other countries. Many countries are in the process of replacing diesel locomotives with electric locomotives due to environmental concerns, a notable example being Switzerland, which has electrified its network. Other forms of guided ground transport outside the traditional railway definitions, such as monorail or maglev, have been tried but have seen limited use. Following a decline after World War II due to competition from cars, rail transport has had a revival in recent decades due to road congestion and rising fuel prices, as well as governments investing in rail as a means of reducing CO2 emissions in the context of concerns about global warming; the history of rail transport began in the 6th century BC in Ancient Greece. It can be divided up into several discrete periods defined by the principal means of track material and motive power used. Evidence indicates that there was 6 to 8.5 km long Diolkos paved trackway, which transported boats across the Isthmus of Corinth in Greece from around 600 BC.
Wheeled vehicles pulled by men and animals ran in grooves in limestone, which provided the track element, preventing the wagons from leaving the intended route. The Diolkos was in use for over 650 years, until at least the 1st century AD; the paved trackways were later built in Roman Egypt. In 1515, Cardinal Matthäus Lang wrote a description of the Reisszug, a funicular railway at the Hohensalzburg Fortress in Austria; the line used wooden rails and a hemp haulage rope and was operated by human or animal power, through a treadwheel. The line still exists and is operational, although in updated form and is the oldest operational railway. Wagonways using wooden rails, hauled by horses, started appearing in the 1550s to facilitate the transport of ore tubs to and from mines, soon became popular in Europe; such an operation was illustrated in Germany in 1556 by Georgius Agricola in his work De re metallica. This line used "Hund" carts with unflanged wheels running on wooden planks and a vertical pin on the truck fitting into the gap between the planks to keep it going the right way.
The miners called the wagons Hunde from the noise. There are many references to their use in central Europe in the 16th century; such a transport system was used by German miners at Cal
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt, wrote in Koine Greek, held Roman citizenship; the 14th-century astronomer Theodore Meliteniotes gave his birthplace as the prominent Greek city Ptolemais Hermiou in the Thebaid. This attestation is quite late, and, according to Gerald Toomer, the translator of his Almagest into English, there is no reason to suppose he lived anywhere other than Alexandria, he died there around AD 168. Ptolemy wrote several scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to Byzantine and Western European science; the first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was entitled the Mathematical Treatise and known as the Great Treatise. The second is the Geography, a thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world; the third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day.
This is sometimes known as the Apotelesmatika but more known as the Tetrabiblos from the Greek meaning "Four Books" or by the Latin Quadripartitum. Ptolemaeus is a Greek name, it occurs once in Greek mythology, is of Homeric form. It was common among the Macedonian upper class at the time of Alexander the Great, there were several of this name among Alexander's army, one of whom made himself pharaoh in 323 BC: Ptolemy I Soter, the first king of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. All male kings of Hellenistic Egypt, until Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC ending the Macedonian family's rule, were Ptolemies; the name Claudius is a Roman nomen. It would have suited custom if the first of Ptolemy's family to become a citizen took the nomen from a Roman called Claudius, responsible for granting citizenship. If, as was common, this was the emperor, citizenship would have been granted between AD 41 and 68; the astronomer would have had a praenomen, which remains unknown. The ninth-century Persian astronomer Abu Maʿshar presents Ptolemy as a member of Egypt's royal lineage, stating that the descendants of Alexander's general Ptolemy I, who ruled Egypt, were wise "and included Ptolemy the Wise, who composed the book of the Almagest".
Abu Maʿshar recorded a belief that a different member of this royal line "composed the book on astrology and attributed it to Ptolemy". We can evidence historical confusion on this point from Abu Maʿshar's subsequent remark "It is sometimes said that the learned man who wrote the book of astrology wrote the book of the Almagest; the correct answer is not known." There is little evidence on the subject of Ptolemy's ancestry, apart from what can be drawn from the details of his name. Ptolemy can be shown to have utilized Babylonian astronomical data, he was a Roman citizen, but was ethnically either a Greek or a Hellenized Egyptian. He was known in Arabic sources as "the Upper Egyptian", suggesting he may have had origins in southern Egypt. Arabic astronomers and physicists referred to him by his name in Arabic: بَطْلُمْيوس Baṭlumyus. Ptolemy's Almagest is the only surviving comprehensive ancient treatise on astronomy. Babylonian astronomers had developed arithmetical techniques for calculating astronomical phenomena.
Ptolemy, claimed to have derived his geometrical models from selected astronomical observations by his predecessors spanning more than 800 years, though astronomers have for centuries suspected that his models' parameters were adopted independently of observations. Ptolemy presented his astronomical models in convenient tables, which could be used to compute the future or past position of the planets; the Almagest contains a star catalogue, a version of a catalogue created by Hipparchus. Its list of forty-eight constellations is ancestral to the modern system of constellations, but unlike the modern system they did not cover the whole sky. Across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in the Medieval period, it was the authoritative text on astronomy, with its author becoming an mythical figure, called Ptolemy, King of Alexandria; the Almagest was preserved, in Arabic manuscripts. Because of its reputation, it was sought and was translated twice into Latin in the 12th century, once in Sicily and again in Spain.
Ptolemy's model, like those of his predecessors, was geocentric and was universally accepted until the appearance of simpler heliocentric models during the scientific revolution. His Planetary Hypotheses went beyond the mathematical model of the Almagest to present a physical realization of the universe as a set of nested spheres, in which he used the epicycles of his planetary model to compute the dimensions of the universe, he estimated the Sun was at an average dis
Valdepeñas
Valdepeñas is a municipality in the province of Ciudad Real, in the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha, Spain. It is the seat of the judicial district that covers the localities of Moral de Calatrava, Santa Cruz de Mudela, Viso del Marqués, Castellar de Santiago and Almuradiel, its name means "Valley of Rocks", because it is located in a wide hilly area surrounded by a meander of the Jabalón River, just bordering on the plain south of La Mancha, the subsoil is rich in limestone rock. It is located in the Campo de Calatrava, an extensive plain north of the Sierra Morena, lies on the left bank of Jabalón River, a tributary of the Guadiana; the hamlet of Consolación is a dependency of Valdepeñas and is located at the intersection between Autovía A-4 and road CR-5214. It was built by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización in 1949; the municipal area houses numerous prehistoric remains and watchtowers located in the hills, compatible with settlers of the Bronze age called Culture of the Motillas, dated between the 10th and 13th centuries BC.
Vasco Merlo in his History of Valdepeñas described these structures erroneously as Celtiberian settlements, despite their being much older than that and belonging to the Culture of Argar. Eight kilometres to the south of the city is located the Iberian city of "Cerro de las Cabezas", a great oppidum or town fortified with a true castle in the summit of the hill that it occupies, inhabited between the 7th and 2nd centuries BC, it is an important archaeological deposit of the Oretana Culture and shows signs of the first vestige of the grapevine in this region. In the 16th century and artefacts such as graves and other ancient Roman items, from a Roman villa of the 1st century BC, that still existed in the Visigothic period. During the Middle Ages period the area was part of the Moorish taifa of Toledo; the Arab inscriptions and a sun dial on the walls of the Church of the Assumption date from this period. According to oral tradition, the Caliphate gave permission to the inhabitants to cultivate vineyards and make wine, prohibited by the Quran.
The Moors were expelled from Valdepenas at the end of the 15th century. By order of Queen Berenguela of Castile and after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, settlers of several villages moved to the area around the present Church of the Assumption, an old castle. From that moment Valdepeñas belonged to the military Order of Calatrava and the first text it is mentioned in is the record of The Order of Calatrava in 1243; the new settlers came from the Kingdoms of León and Aragón. The Order demanded conditions of establishment and right of citizenship, the continued care of the grapevine. In medieval times the Jewish community became important and this is reflected in the existence at least two synagogues, one of, converted into the hermitage of Veracruz and the old building where the Parish of The Christ was located, behind its present location; the Catholic Monarchs and Isabella of Castille, lodged in Valdepeñas on 18 February 1488 at the mother of Alfonso de Merlo's house, left to the care of the widow the infants during part of the conquest of Granada.
The same Alfonso de Merlo was named Captain and went with more than two hundred men to the Conquest of Granada, funding the campaign with his own money. The Catholic Monarchs granted him the title of Knight; some of his descendants took important positions in Peru and Chile. Diverse religious and civil buildings from the 16th century such as the Trinitarians Covent can be found in the town. King Ferdinand the Catholic wanted to control the power of Military Orders, Pope Adrian VI granted orders to the Kingdom of Castile, passing to Royal Jurisdiction an important patrimony: two cities, two hundred villas and a hundred of villages, distributed in an ample territory. King Philip II sold the villa on 22 April 1575 to D. Alvaro de Bazán first Marquess of Santa Cruz, who became Lord of Valdepeñas. Valdepeñas would happen to be a "Señorío"; the successive marquesses promoted the wines of Valdepeñas in the Spanish Court of the Austrian and its fame extended all over the country. Valdepeñas' "clarete" became known as "aloque" at this time.
Valdepeñas led a quiet existence until 6 June 1808, when Napoleon's occupation of Spain became an issue after the events of 2 May in Madrid of that year. Napoleon's troops attempted to cross the villa; the result was a high number of a major fire. Highlighted in the fight was a woman, Juana Galán "La Galana"; the outcome was that the troops had to retreat from the province of La Mancha, a delay which led, at least in part, to the Spanish victory at the Battle of Bailen. King Fernando VII would give the villa the Title of "Very Heroic". After these events some inhabitants from Valdepeñas took part of the guerrilla fighting against the Napoleonic troops in the "Guerra de la Independencia", Francisco Abad, "Chaleco", became a famous guerrillero. At the beginning of the 20th century, the appearance of Phylloxera led to the introduction of the resistant American vine but did not change the economy much; the Spanish Civil War broke this development, the city's population decreased. From the 1940s to the 1970s the only economical activities were agriculture and the traditional family industry of wine, a common phenomenon of central Spain i
Cortes y Graena
Cortes y Graena is a municipality in the province of Granada, Spain. As of 2010, it has a population of 1033 inhabitants
Plateau
In geology and physical geography, a plateau called a high plain or a tableland, is an area of a highland consisting of flat terrain, raised above the surrounding area with one or more sides with steep slopes. Plateaus can be formed by a number of processes, including upwelling of volcanic magma, extrusion of lava, erosion by water and glaciers. Plateaus are classified according to their surrounding environment as intermontane, piedmont, or continental. Plateaus can be formed by a number of processes, including upwelling of volcanic magma, extrusion of lava, erosion by water and glaciers. Volcanic plateaus are produced by volcanic activity; the Columbia Plateau in the northwestern United States is an example. They may be formed by upwelling of volcanic extrusion of lava; the underlining mechanism in forming plateaus from upwelling starts when magma rises from the mantle, causing the ground to swell upward. In this way, flat areas of rock are uplifted to form a plateau. For plateaus formed by extrusion, the rock is built up from lava spreading outward from cracks and weak areas in the crust.
Plateaus can be formed by the erosional processes of glaciers on mountain ranges, leaving them sitting between the mountain ranges. Water can erode mountains and other landforms down into plateaus. Dissected plateaus are eroded plateaus cut by rivers and broken by deep narrow valleys. Computer modeling studies suggest that high plateaus may be a result from the feedback between tectonic deformation and dry climatic conditions created at the lee side of growing orogens. Plateaus are classified according to their surrounding environment. Intermontane plateaus are the highest in the world, bordered by mountains; the Tibetan Plateau is one such plateau. Lava or volcanic plateaus are the plateau; the magma that comes out through narrow cracks or fissures in the crust spread over large area and solidifies. These layers of lava sheets form volcanic plateaus; the Antrim plateau in Northern Ireland, The Deccan Plateau in India and the Columbia Plateau in the United States are examples of lava plateaus. Piedmont plateaus are bordered on one side by mountains and on the other by a sea.
The Piedmont Plateau of the Eastern United States between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Coastal Plain is an example. Continental plateaus are bordered on all sides by oceans, forming away from the mountains. An example of a continental plateau is the Antarctic Polar Plateau in East Antarctica; the largest and highest plateau in the world is the Tibetan Plateau, sometimes metaphorically described as the "Roof of the World", still being formed by the collisions of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates. The Tibetan plateau covers 2,500,000 km2, at about 5,000 m above sea level; the plateau is sufficiently high to reverse the Hadley cell convection cycles and to drive the monsoons of India towards the south. The second-highest plateau is the Deosai Plateau of the Deosai National Park at an average elevation of 4,114 m, it is located in northern Pakistan. Deosai means'the land of giants'; the park protects an area of 3,000 km2. It is known for its rich flora and fauna of the Karakoram-West Tibetan Plateau alpine steppe ecoregion.
In spring it is covered by a wide variety of butterflies. The highest point in Deosai is Deosai Lake, or Sheosar Lake from the Shina language meaning "Blind lake" near the Chilim Valley; the lake lies at an elevation of 4,142 m, one of the highest lakes in the world, is 2.3 km long, 1.8 km wide, 40 m deep on average. Some other major plateaus in Asia are: Najd in the Arabian Peninsula elevation 762 to 1,525 m, Armenian Highlands, Iranian plateau, Anatolian Plateau, Mongolian Plateau, the Deccan Plateau. Another large plateau is the icy Antarctic Plateau, sometimes referred to as the Polar Plateau, home to the geographic South Pole and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which covers most of East Antarctica where there are no known mountains but rather 3,000 m high of superficial ice and which spreads slowly toward the surrounding coastline through enormous glaciers; this polar ice cap is so massive that the echolocation sound measurements of ice thickness have shown that large parts of the Antarctic "dry land" surface have been pressed below sea level.
Thus, if that same ice cap were removed, the large areas of the frozen white continent would be flooded by the surrounding Antarctic Ocean or Southern Ocean. On the other hand, were the ice cap melts away too the surface of the land beneath it would rebound away through isostasy from the center of the Earth and that same land would rise above sea level. A large plateau in North America is the Colorado Plateau, which covers about 337,000 km2 in Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. In northern Arizona and southern Utah the Colorado Plateau is bisected by the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. How this came to be is that over 10 million years ago, a river was there, though not on the same cours
Andalusia
Andalusia is an autonomous community in southern Spain. It is the most populous, the second largest autonomous community in the country; the Andalusian autonomous community is recognised as a "historical nationality". The territory is divided into eight provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga and Seville, its capital is the city of Seville. Andalusia is located in the south of the Iberian peninsula, in south-western Europe south of the autonomous communities of Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha. Andalusia is the only European region with both Atlantic coastlines; the small British overseas territory of Gibraltar shares a three-quarter-mile land border with the Andalusian province of Cádiz at the eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar. The main mountain ranges of Andalusia are the Sierra Morena and the Baetic System, consisting of the Subbaetic and Penibaetic Mountains, separated by the Intrabaetic Basin. In the north, the Sierra Morena separates Andalusia from the plains of Extremadura and Castile–La Mancha on Spain's Meseta Central.
To the south the geographic subregion of Upper Andalusia lies within the Baetic System, while Lower Andalusia is in the Baetic Depression of the valley of the Guadalquivir. The name "Andalusia" is derived from the Arabic word Al-Andalus; the toponym al-Andalus is first attested by inscriptions on coins minted in 716 by the new Muslim government of Iberia. These coins, called dinars, were inscribed in both Arabic; the etymology of the name "al-Andalus" has traditionally been derived from the name of the Vandals. Halm in 1989 derived the name from a Gothic term, *landahlauts, in 2002, Bossong suggested its derivation from a pre-Roman substrate; the region's history and culture have been influenced by the native Iberians, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Muslim Moors and the Castilian and other Christian North Iberian nationalities who reconquered and settled the area in the latter phases of the Reconquista. Andalusia has been a agricultural region, compared to the rest of Spain and the rest of Europe.
However, the growth of the community in the sectors of industry and services was above average in Spain and higher than many communities in the Eurozone. The region has a strong identity. Many cultural phenomena that are seen internationally as distinctively Spanish are or Andalusian in origin; these include flamenco and, to a lesser extent and Hispano-Moorish architectural styles, both of which are prevalent in other regions of Spain. Andalusia's hinterland is the hottest area of Europe, with cities like Córdoba and Seville averaging above 36 °C in summer high temperatures. Late evening temperatures can sometimes stay around 35 °C until close to midnight, with daytime highs of over 40 °C common. Seville has the highest average annual temperature in mainland Spain and mainland Europe followed by Almería, its present form is derived from the Arabic name for Muslim Iberia, "Al-Andalus". However, the etymology of the name "Al-Andalus" is disputed, the extent of Iberian territory encompassed by the name has changed over the centuries.
The Spanish place name Andalucía was introduced into the Spanish languages in the 13th century under the form el Andalucía. The name was adopted to refer to those territories still under Moorish rule, south of Castilla Nueva and Valencia, corresponding with the former Roman province hitherto called Baetica in Latin sources; this was a Castilianization of Al-Andalusiya, the adjectival form of the Arabic language al-Andalus, the name given by the Arabs to all of the Iberian territories under Muslim rule from 711 to 1492. The etymology of al-Andalus is itself somewhat debated, but in fact it entered the Arabic language before this area came under Muslim rule. Like the Arabic term al-Andalus, in historical contexts the Spanish term Andalucía or the English term Andalusia do not refer to the exact territory designated by these terms today; the term referred to territories under Muslim control. In the Estoria de España of Alfonso X of Castile, written in the second half of the 13th century, the term Andalucía is used with three different meanings: As a literal translation of the Arabic al-Ándalus when Arabic texts are quoted.
To designate the territories the Christians had regained by that time in the Guadalquivir valley and in the Kingdoms of Granada and Murcia. In a document from 1253, Alfonso X styled himself León y de toda Andalucía. To designate the territories the Christians had regained by that time in the Guadalquivir valley but not the Kingdom of Granada; this was the most common significance in Early modern period. From an administrative point of view, Granada remained separate for many years after the completion of the Reconquista due, above all, to its emblematic character as the last territory regained, as the seat of the important Real Chancillería de Granada, a court of last resort. Stil
Spain
Andalusia
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Celanova, Spain
Guanare, Venezuela
La Güera, Western Sahara
Piaseczno, Poland
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "article name needed". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton. [1]
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