Fifty years of Regional Geography in Spain: a University Spanish school and epoch-defining textbook

Abstract

The text commemorates the fifty years of the first Regional Geography of Spain, conceived as a work of the Spanish geographical school as a textbook for university students, and a reference book for other related scientists and educated readers. The work was directed by the two great teachers of 20th-century geography, Lluis Solé Sabarís, Catalan professor of physical geography, and Manuel de Terán, a human geographer from Madrid, and was written by authors from different Spanish universities. The history of the book is made, and the following of the regional method of the French school of geography, then dominant, is discussed. The option for the division into historical regions as true geographical regions instead of natural ones is considered. It is also analyzed to what extent the work translates the great demographic and territorial changes that took place in the second half of the 20th century. It is concluded that because it is a university textbook, result of the joint work of geographers of the different parts of Spain, and belonging to a moment of transformation of the country, it is one of the books that defined an era in Spanish Geography.