Template:On this day - February 8

Joaquín Costa

• 1517 – The expedition organized by Diego Velázquez (governor of the island) and commanded by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba sets out from Santiago de Cuba for Yucatán (present-day Mexico).
• 1575 – Leiden University (the oldest in the Netherlands, originally founded on the previous 6 January by Philip II in what was still part of the Spanish Netherlands) is appropriated by William of Orange (whom the Hispanic monarch had placed in charge of it).
• 1586 – In Madrid, by order of Philip II, the General Hospital of Our Lady of the Incarnation and Saint Roch is created.
• 1814 – Juan Bautista Arismendi, on the orders of Simón Bolívar, has 886 Spanish prisoners executed in Caracas. To swell their number he also executed the 300 sick and wounded in the hospital of La Guaira.
• 1814 – Birth of Juan Rafael Mora Porras, merchant and politician, 2nd president of Costa Rica (d. 1860).
• 1828 – Birth of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, politician and historian, President of the Council of Ministers on six occasions (d. 1897).
• 1898 – General José María Reina Barrios, President of Guatemala, is assassinated, giving rise to the 22-year government of Manuel Estrada Cabrera.
• 1911 – Death of Joaquín Costa, Spanish politician, jurist, economist and historian, the main representative of Regenerationism, an ideological current of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• 1934 – During the Second Spanish Republic, the Government orders the general disarmament of the Spanish civilian population.
• 1937 – Francoist troops seize Málaga in the course of the Spanish Civil War.
• 1941 – In France, the sculpture "Lady of Elche" is recovered for Spain.
• 1981 – Death of María Cervantes, Cuban pianist, singer and composer (b. 1885).
• 2002 – In Spain, the government's Council of Ministers approves the Bill on Information Society Services and Electronic Commerce (LSSI).
• 2021 – Death of Gilbert Chauny de Porturas-Hoyle, Peruvian diplomat, architect and genealogist (b. 1944).