On July 17 1936, 34 year-old Captain Virgilio Leret of the Spanish Air Force was relaxing with his wife, Carlota Leret O’Neill, and his two daughters, Maria Gabriela and Carlota. He had rented a yacht and anchored it just off the Atalayón Hydroplane base in Melilla in North Africa, where he had been posted as base commander. The yacht was an ideal place to escape the July heat of the African coast and his family had joined him for a short holiday. This was the summer holiday season when the Spanish flocked to the coasts.  This yearly exodus to escape the heat was called to verano. The bas ..read more

Balboa’s luck seemed to have run out, but fate stepped in to give him a last reprieve. The colony’s newly appointed, Bishop de Quevedo, intervened and cautioned Pedrarias about abusing his power. The church still had considerable authority here in this far-flung outpost, and a reluctant Pedrarias moderated the harsh treatment he had planned for Balboa. Pedrarias must have been furious, but worse was to follow for the governor. If Balboa had a guardian angel she must have been working overtime in Spain. King Ferdinand died in January 1516, and whether it was a last wish of the king, or a decree ..read more

In the space of three years, Vasco Núñez de Balboa had come from being a bankrupt stowaway to the governor of the only settlement on the American mainland after ousting the two governors appointed by the King of Spain. He had performed this minor miracle whilst living in the most inhospitable jungle and facing ferocious natives; but Balboa was just getting started. In late 1512 he entered the territory of the cacique Careta who rallied his warriors to defend their lands. He defeated the chief, but later befriended him.  Subsequently, he converted him to Christianity and had him baptized ..read more

This story begins in 1509 with the discovery of a stowaway and his dog hiding in a barrel that had been loaded onto a ship sailing from Santo Domingo in Hispaniola to San Sebastian in Nueva Andalusia in the Caribbean. The stowaway and his dog were brought before the commander of the ship, Martín Fernández de Enciso, who demanded their names. The 34 year-old stowaway gave his name as Vasco Núñez de Balboa and that his dog was named Leoncico. Further questioning revealed that both were running away from creditors in Santo Domingo. Unimpressed with these two scoundrels, Enciso ordered that they b ..read more

Isabel of Castile’s youngest daughter, Catherine, was betrothed to Arthur, the Prince of Wales, the son and heir of Henry VII of England. The marriage had been arranged when Arthur was only three and Catharine two. It was a high-profile agreement between two nations designed to cement an alliance between Spain and England against France. The Treaty of Medina del Campo was a bold plan by Henry II Tudor, who had ousted the Plantagenet line at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and was worried about the many more rightful claimers to the throne of England still alive. Of the twenty six clauses in the ..read more

Enrique, king of … well, nothing, flew into a rage when he heard about the marriage of Isabel and Ferdinand. His seedy and devious advisors, chief of whom was Juan Pacheco, the Marquis of Villena, put Joanna forward as the rightful heir to the crown. In a breathtaking betrayal, the Archbishop of Toledo left Isabel’s court to unite with his great-nephew, Juan Pacheco, to support him with his claim. This foul crew were even more enraged when Isabel gave birth to a girl, whom she named Isabella after her mother, just over eleven months after the marriage. (2 Oct 1470) To the delight of the nobles ..read more

Written history is mostly composed of the names of kings and queens and the wars that they got themselves into. Peppered with dates of their births and deaths, they lie silently on the pages of history books like gravestones in a cemetery. But every so often, the whole world is changed forever by a monarch whose strength and spirit transcends the dust of time. Queen Isabel of Castile was one such monarch. Before her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon, Hispaña was a disjointed union of often warring kingdoms. Powerful ducal family dynasties really controlled the power of the kings, and in turn, th ..read more

Galicia’s countryside is a land of smallholders whose farms may be small, but whose farmhouses are large. Many still contain the horreró, a store for grains and maize, like a small chapel standing on stilts sometimes crowned with a cross. Manuel Rivas, a poet and novelist who writes in Galego once calculated that there were a million Galician cows – one for every three inhabitants. Mad cow disease coupled with reduced EU milk quotas have reduced that number, but the early twentieth-century politician, Daniel Castelaeo, stated that the cow, the fish and the tree are Galicia’s holy trinity. It ..read more

Galicia is not mainstream Spain. It has always been separate as an older, less cosmopolitan, part of the Iberian Peninsula. For centuries Galicia was a byword for poverty and emigration, and its heritage granted it an equal status to Catalonia or the Basque country as a fringe society, but there has never been any argument in that Galicia one was amongst true Spaniards. They were probably here first; right after the end of the last Ice-Age. The rest of Spain has been overrun by many invaders whose feet first trod the earth in far distant lands, and whose mix of bloodlines has diluted the ancie ..read more

Having just watched the celebrations for the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, I remembered something that I read some time ago. There have been many ties and conflicts between British kings and queens and the royalty of Spain over the centuries, but this is a very incorruptible and noble one.   Antonio de Ulloa was born in Seville, Spain in January 1716. His father, Bernardo de Ulloa, was noted for his writings on economics, and his brother, Fernando, would become an engineer and the chief of works of the Canal de Castilla, a 207 km. long canal that runs through Burgos, Palenc ..read more