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8
November
2026

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On this day, November 8

Portrait of Martín Fernández de Navarrete
Martín Fernández de Navarrete


Featured Film

Official poster of the film "Hispanoamérica, canto de vida y esperanza"
Official poster of "Hispanoamérica, canto de vida y esperanza"

Hispanoamérica, canto de vida y esperanza is a Spanish historical documentary directed by José Luis López-Linares and released in 2024, offering "a renewed, truthful and visually powerful vision of how Spanish America was really born and developed."

Through interviews with more than sixty historians and experts, most of them from the American continent, the film offers an enriching and renewing look at the shared history between Spain and America.

Director López-Linares states:

...the State has done nothing for the Spanish nation for a great many years. ...the history of Spain has been increasingly forgotten, hidden, disdained, until reaching what we have now, which is like a total invisibility of everything that Spain is, and of the history of Spain and America. And as Carmen Iglesias says in the film, if you do not know America you do not know Spain. And all of that has been constantly denied, hidden or dismissed. Today the history of Spain and the history of America are kept apart, they are two separate specialties, even though it is really impossible to understand Spain without America. And the other way around.

For a long time I felt a great unease about the way the History of Spain was being told. My travels to Spanish America only increased that feeling that something does not fit. That we are squandering a treasure. The unease gradually turned into indignation at having to endure so many lies, half-truths, and enormous nonsense, such as the idea that Spain had to apologize for its History. We are always placed on a footing of inferiority before any foreigner, and what is worse, also before the Spaniards of the overseas territories.

...what surprised and also satisfied me most was the gratitude of the viewers ... I know I have met a need. With the film we have filled a void, a gap of esteem, of pride, of knowing history, of knowing where you come from, of not going around thinking that your grandparents and great-great-grandparents were murderers, and that this liberation is as if someone tells you, hey, your father did not kill this man, that this fellow who was accused and who went to prison for it was innocent ... A tremendous weight is lifted off you. I believe that is the kind of gratitude I have felt. And gratitude not only from the Spaniards who went to the cinema here, but from Mexicans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians. Here, at the preview, there were many people from Spanish America and I felt that, I felt the affection.

Featured Publication

Title page of "Los veintiún libros de los ingenios y de las máquinas"
The Twenty-One Books of Devices and Machines

The Twenty-One Books of Devices and Machines (Los veintiún libros de los ingenios y de las máquinas) constitute the first systematic treatise in the world on what in the 16th century was known as Hydraulic architecture. The work discusses water as the main source of energy, and as a route of transport and trade along navigable rivers and canals, during the Renaissance.

The original text was not published in its time because it contained information on materials and works obtained with the royal consent of Philip II. It is therefore the only written source for knowledge of the mechanical arts known and practiced in the 16th century.

The manuscript is divided into five volumes and includes four hundred and forty highly detailed drawings of excellent quality that complete the precise description of the technical processes. In addition, the machines and devices are accompanied by exploded views, which make it possible to appreciate the details of how they worked.

Although for centuries the work was attributed to a Spanish-Milanese engineer and inventor named Juanelo Turriano, later research has concluded that it was in fact written by Pedro Juan de Lastanosa, "machinist of Philip II." Its authorship was already questioned by the first researchers of the manuscript in the 18th century, among other reasons because the language used contains Aragonese expressions and specific geographical references that could hardly have been known to Turriano.

Featured Page

Portrait of Isidore of Seville painted in 1655 by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Portrait of Isidore of Seville by Murillo.
Isidore of Seville (Latin: Isidorus Hispalensis; born probably in Cartagena, c. 556 - Seville, 4 April 636) was a cleric of the Catholic Church and a Hispano-Gothic polymath scholar.

He served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades (599-636) and was canonized by the Catholic Church, for which he is commonly known as Saint Isidore of Seville.

His best-known work is the Etymologies, a monumental work that captures the evolution of knowledge from pagan and Christian antiquity down to the 7th century. This text, also called Origines, is divided into twenty books with 448 chapters, and constitutes an enormous encyclopedic work in which all the fields of the knowledge of the age are gathered and systematized (theology, history, literature, art, law, grammar, cosmology, natural sciences, ...), thus creating what is considered the first encyclopedia in history.

Thanks to this work, it became possible to preserve Roman culture and transmit it to Visigothic Hispania, making it an extremely influential work throughout the Middle Ages. For much of the medieval period it was the most widely used text in educational institutions, and it was printed ten times between 1470 and 1529.

In recognition of his work, we have decided to name Saint Isidore of Seville as the Patron of this Hispanopedia.

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