Template:On this day - October 21

Cosme Damián Churruca

• 1094 – Troops led by Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid Campeador) defeat the Almoravids at the Battle of Cuarte.
• 1285 – In Castile, King Sancho IV and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Abd al-Haqq (sultan of Morocco) make peace after the latter besieged Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz) and attacked Seville.
• 1496 – In Flanders, Joanna of Castile (later called Joanna the Mad) and Philip the Handsome marry.
• 1520 – At the eastern mouth of the Strait of Magellan, the navigator Ferdinand Magellan discovers Cape of the Virgins.
• 1625 – In Puerto Rico, the Dutch corsair Balduino Enrico sets fire to the city of San Juan and La Fortaleza before withdrawing wounded.
• 1650 – Death of Pedro Espinosa, Spanish poet and anthologist (b. 1578).
• 1728 – Birth of the Count of Floridablanca, Spanish politician (d. 1808).
• 1805 – The Battle of Trafalgar takes place, ending in a decisive victory of the British Royal Navy over the Franco-Spanish fleet.
• 1805 – Death of Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, Spanish cartographer and naval officer (b. 1760).
• 1805 – Death of Francisco Alsedo y Bustamante, Spanish military and naval officer (b. 1758).
• 1805 – Death of Cosme de Churruca, Spanish scientist and naval officer (b. 1761).
• 1807 – Birth of Hilarión Eslava, Spanish composer and musicologist (d. 1878).
• 1944 – In El Salvador, a coup d'état deposes the provisional president, General Andrés Ignacio Menéndez, and replaces him on an interim basis in the same office with Colonel Osmín Aguirre y Salinas.
• 1956 – In Tegucigalpa (Honduras), President Julio Lozano Díaz is overthrown.
• 1971 – In Sweden, Pablo Neruda receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• 1982 – In Sweden, Gabriel García Márquez receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• 2003 – Death of Luis A. Ferré, politician, engineer, businessman, philanthropist and governor of Puerto Rico between 1969 and 1973 (b. 1904).