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| 1000 Spanish pesetas banknote |
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| 1000 Spanish pesetas note |
Spain currency 1000 Pesetas banknote of 1979, issued by the Bank of Spain - El Banco de España.
Spanish banknotes, Spanish bank notes, Spanish paper money, Spain banknotes, Spain bank notes, Spain paper money.Obverse: Portrait of the playwright and novelist Benito Perez Galdos, painted by Joaquín Sorolla in 1894. Millennial Dragon Tree at Icod de los Vinos, Tenerife Island (Dracaena draco) as a registration device. Coat of arms of the King of Spain at upper right.
Signatures: Don José Ramón Álvarez Rendueles (Governor - El Gobernador, Mar. 1978 - Jul. 1984).
Reverse: Man and woman near rock formations of Cañadas del Teide (Gorges of the Teide) at Teide National Park - Parque Nacional del Teide - a national park located in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. Roque Cinchado (left) and Mount Teide (3718 m) volcano (center), the highest mountain of Spain and the islands of the Atlantic. Map of the Canary Islands. Millenial Dragon Tree as a registration device.
Author's handwriting: "... y entre los muertos habrá siempre una lengua viva para decir que Zaragoza no se rinde..." (… and among the dead there will always be an alive language to say that Zaragoza does not surrender…).
Watermark: Portrait of Benito Pérez Galdós.
Dimensions: 138 x 75 mm.
Printed by Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre, Madrid.
Date of Issue: 23 October 1979 (circulated from 1983).
Date of withdrawal: 1992.
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Spanish Currency - 1000 Pesetas
Benito Pérez Galdós
Benito Pérez Galdós (May 10, 1843 – January 4, 1920) was a Spanish realist novelist. Some authorities consider him second only to Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist. He was the leading literary figure in 19th century Spain.
Galdós was a prolific writer, publishing 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He remains popular in Spain, and is considered as equal to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. As recently as 1950, few of Galdós's works were available translated to English, although he has slowly become popular in the Anglophone world.
While his plays are generally considered to be less successful than his novels, Realidad (1892) is important in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre.
The Galdós museum in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, features a portrait of the writer by Joaquín Sorolla.
Career as a writer
By 1865, he was publishing articles in La Nación on literature, art, music, and politics and it was clear that he was not going to pursue a legal career. His first attempt at a literary career came in 1867, when a didactic historical verse drama was rejected. His next venture into the theatre did not take place until 1892.
He had already become enthusiastic about the novels of Charles Dickens and, in 1868, his translation of Pickwick Papers introduced his work to the Spanish public. The previous year, he had visited Paris and had begun to read the works of Balzac. In 1870, he was appointed editor of La Revista de España and began to express his opinions on a wide range of diverse topics such as history, culture, politics, art, music and literature. Between 1867 and 1868, he wrote what would be his first novel, La Fontana de Oro, a historical work set in the period 1820–1823. With the help of money from his sister-in-law, it was published privately in 1870. Critical reaction was slow to gain momentum but it was eventually hailed as the beginning of a new phase in Spanish fiction, and was highly praised for its literary quality as well as for its social and moral purpose.
National Episodes
He next developed the outline of a major project, the Episodios Nacionales: a series of historical novels outlining the major events in Spanish history from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 to his own times. The ostensible aim of this project was to regenerate Spain through the awakening of a new sense of national identity. The first episode was called Trafalgar and appeared in 1873. Successive episodes appeared in fits and starts until the forty-sixth and final novel, Cánovas, appeared in 1912. Every so often, Galdós seemed to grow tired of this project and stated that he would not write another episode. However, the public bought them avidly, despite the criticism that was levelled at his other works, and they remained the basis of his contemporary reputation and income. He conducted an enormous amount of research in the writing of these stories because official reports, newspaper accounts and histories were often rigidly partisan. To achieve balance and a wider perspective, Galdós sought out survivors and eyewitnesses to the actual events – such as an old man who had been a cabin boy aboard the ship Santísima Trinidad at Trafalgar, who became the central figure of that book. Galdós is often critical of the official versions of the events he describes and often ran into problems with the Catholic Church, then a dominant force in Spanish cultural life.
Other novels
His other novels were classified into 3 groups by José Montesinos:
1. the early works from La Fontana de Oro up to La familia de León Roch (1878). The best known of these is probably Doña Perfecta (1876), which describes the impact made by the arrival of a young radical on a stiflingly clerical town. In Marianela (1878) a young man regains his eyesight after a life of blindness and rejects his best friend Marianela for her ugliness.
2. the Novelas españolas contemporáneas, from La desheredada (1881) to Angel Guerra (1891), a loosely related series of 22 novels which are the author’s major claim to literary distinction, including his masterpiece Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–1887). They are bound together by the device of recurring characters, borrowed from Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Fortunata y Jacinta is almost as long as War and Peace. It concerns the fortunes of four characters: a young man-about-town, his wife, his lower-class mistress, and her husband. The character of Fortunata is based on a real girl whom Galdós first saw in a tenement building in Madrid, drinking a raw egg – which is the way in which the fictional characters come to meet.
3. the later novels of psychological investigation, many of which are in dialogue form.
Influences and characteristics
Galdós was an enthusiastic traveller. His novels display a detailed knowledge of not only Madrid but many other cities, towns and villages of Spain – such as Toledo in Angel Guerra. He visited the UK on many occasions, his first trip being in 1883. The descriptions of the various districts and low-life characters that he encountered in Madrid, particularly in Fortunata y Jacinta, are similar to the approaches of Dickens and the French Realist novelists such as Balzac. Galdós also shows a Balzacian interest in technology and crafts, for example the lengthy descriptions of the ropery in La desheredada or the detailed accounts of how the heroine of La de Bringas (1884) embroiders her pictures out of hair.
He was also inspired by Émile Zola and Naturalism in which, under the influence of the deterministic philosophy of Hippolyte Taine, writers strove to show how their characters were forged by the interaction of heredity, environment and social conditions – race, milieu, et moment. In addition, these writers were keen to suggest that their works were scientific dissections of society. This set of influences is, perhaps, at its clearest in Lo prohibido (1884–1885), which is also noteworthy for being told in the first person by an unreliable narrator who, in addition, dies during the course of the work – it pre-dates similar experiments by André Gide such as L'immoraliste.
Another influence came from the philosophy of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, which became influential in Spain mainly due to the influence of the famous educationalist Francisco Giner de los Ríos. The clearest example of this influence on Galdós is in his novel El Amigo Manso (1882). However, it is also clear that the mystical tendencies of krausismo led to his interest in insanity and the strange wisdom that can sometimes be shown by those people who appear to be mad. This becomes a theme of great importance in the works of Galdós from Fortunata y Jacinta onwards, for example in Miau (1888) and his final novel La razón de la sinrazón.
All through his literary career, Galdós incurred the wrath of the Catholic press. He attacked what he saw as abuses of entrenched and dogmatic religious power rather than religious faith or Christianity per se. In fact, the need for faith is a very important feature in many of his novels and there are many sympathetic portraits of priests and nuns.
Return to the theatre
His first mature play was Realidad, an adaptation of his novel of the same name, which had been written in dialogue. Galdós was attracted to the idea of making direct contact with his public and seeing and hearing their reactions. Rehearsals began in February 1892. The theatre was packed on the opening night and received the play enthusiastically. Galdós took about 15 curtain calls. However, although the audience reception was good, the play did not receive universal critical acclaim because of its realistic dialogue which did not accord with the general theatrical language of the time, the setting of a scene in the boudoir of a courtesan, and the un-Spanish attitude towards a wife’s adultery. The Catholic press did not attend the performance but this did not prevent them from denouncing the author as a perverse and wicked influence. The play ran for twenty nights.
In 1901, his play Electra caused a storm of outrage and floods of equally hyperbolic enthusiasm. As in many of his works, Galdós targeted clericalism and the inhuman fanaticism and superstition that can accompany it. The performance was interrupted by audience reaction and the author had to take many curtain calls. After the third night, the conservative and clerical parties organised a demonstration outside the theatre. The police moved in and arrested two members of a workers’ organization who had reacted against the demonstration. Several people were wounded as a result of the clash and, the next day, the newspapers were divided between liberal support for the play and Catholic/conservative condemnation. Over one hundred performances were given in Madrid alone and the play was also performed in the provinces. In 1934, 33 years later, a revival in Madrid produced much the same degree of uproar and outrage.
Later life and political involvement
Despite his attacks on the forces of conservatism, Galdós had only shown a weak interest in being directly involved in politics. In 1886 the Prime Minister Práxedes Mateo Sagasta appointed him as the (absent) deputy for the town and district of Guayama, Puerto Rico at the Madrid parliament; he never visited the place, but had a representative inform him of the status of the area, and felt a duty to represent its inhabitants appropriately. This appointment lasted for five years and mainly seems to have given him the chance to observe the conduct of politics at first hand, which informs scenes in some of his novels.
By 1907, however, there was no sign of national regeneration and the government of the day was making no attempt to control or limit the powers of the Catholic Church. At the age of 64, he re-entered the political arena as a Republican deputy. He seems to have undertaken the task of uniting the anti-monarchic groups, which included Democrats, Republicans, liberals and socialists. He even approached the Marxist leader Pablo Iglesias and persuaded him to join a new organisation called La Conjunción Republicano-socialista, with Galdós as its titular head.
However, by 1912, Galdós was growing disillusioned with the way that the personal ambitions of his fellow Republicans conflicted with achieving genuine political change and it was becoming clear that the coalition of anti-monarchic groups was unable to exercise any great influence over developments. He began to fade from the scene of active political involvement. In 1914, he was the Republican candidate for Las Palmas, but this was more of a local tribute to him. In 1916, after an audience with Alfonso XIII, Galdós abandoned his anti-monarchic views. He had been blind since 1912, was in financial difficulties and increasingly troubled by illness.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for five years, 1912–16, which would both have increased his prestige outside Spain and improved his financial status, but neither was successful. Among those who nominated Pérez Galdós was the 1904 winner José Echegaray. A national subscription scheme was set up to raise money to help Pérez Galdós, to which the King and his Prime Minister Romanones were the first to subscribe. The activities of the Catholic press, which sneered at the writer as a blind beggar, along with the outbreak of World War I, led to the scheme being closed in 1916 with the money raised being less than half what would be required to clear his debts and set up a pension. In that same year, however, the Ministry of Public Instruction appointed him to take charge of the arrangements for the Cervantes tercentenary, for a stipend of 1000 pesetas per month. Although the event never took place, the stipend continued for the rest of Galdós’s life.
In 1897, Pérez Galdós had been elected to the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy). After becoming blind he continued to dictate his books for the rest of his life. Pérez Galdós died at the age of 76. Shortly before his death, a statue in his honour was constructed in the Parque del Buen Retiro, the most popular park in Madrid, financed solely by public donations.
Film adaptations
His novels have yielded many cinematic adaptations: Beauty in Chains (Doña Perfecta) was directed by Elsie Jane Wilson in 1918; Viridiana (1961), by Luis Buñuel, is based upon Halma; Buñuel also adapted Nazarín (1959) and Tristana (1970); La Duda was filmed in 1972 by Rafael Gil; El Abuelo (1998) (The Grandfather), by José Luis Garci, was internationally released a year later; it previously had been adapted as the Argentine film, El Abuelo (1954).
Teide National Park
Teide National Park (Spanish: Parque nacional del Teide) is a national park located in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain).
The national park is centered on Mount Teide, the highest mountain of Spain (3,718 metres high). Its national park status was passed on 22 January 1954, making it the third oldest national park in Spain (together with Caldera de Taburiente National Park, also in the Canary islands). Pico Viejo, also included within the national park limits, is the second highest volcano in the Canary Islands with its 3,135 m peak. Mount Teide and Pico Viejo are the only two peaks in the Canary islands rising above the 3,000 m level.
The park has an area of 18,990 hectares located in the municipality of La Orotava. It was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO on June 28, 2007. Since the end of 2007, it has also been one of the 12 Treasures of Spain. On a ridge, to the east of Teide, are the telescopes of the Observatorio del Teide.
Teide is the most visited national park in Spain and Europe and −by 2015− the eighth most visited in the world, with some 3 million visitors yearly. In 2016, it was visited by 4,079,823 visitors and tourists reaching a historical record. The Teide is the most famous natural icon not only of Tenerife but also of all the Canary Islands.
The Teide National Park has a large historical value. This place had an important spiritual significance to aboriginal Guanches and important archaeological sites have been discovered in the park. For the Guanches the Teide was a place of worship, they thought it was the gate of hell (Echeyde).
National park status was declared on January 22, 1954, which was one of the third in Spain. In 1981 the park was reclassified and established as a special legal regime. In 1989, the Council of Europe awarded the European Diploma of Protected Areas, in its highest category. This recognition and conservation management has been subsequently renewed in 1994, 1999 and 2004.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of its transformation into a national park, in 2002 the paperwork was begun to declare the park a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On June 28, 2007, after five years of work and effort, UNESCO decided to declare the Teide National Park, World Heritage Site in the World Heritage Convention of UNESCO held in Christchurch, New Zealand. Teide National Park is also at the end of 2007, one of the 12 Treasures of Spain.
Teide National Park is complementary to the Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, this is mainly due to being in each of them represented the volcanic structures and forms less evolved magmas of such islands (Hawaii) and more evolved and differentiated (Teide). Moreover, Teide National Park shares similar scenic characteristics with the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, United States.
Flora and fauna
The lava flows on the flanks of Teide weather to a very thin, but nutrient and mineral rich soil that supports a diverse number of plant species. Vascular flora consists of 168 plant species, 33 of which are endemic to Tenerife.
Forests of Canary Island pine (Pinus canariensis) occur from 1000–2100 m, covering the middle slopes of the volcano, and having an alpine timberline 1000 m lower than that of continental mountains of similar latitude. At higher altitudes, the Las Cañadas caldera provides sufficient shelter for more fragile species such as the Canary Island cedar (Juniperus cedrus), and the Canary Island pine (Pinus canariensis) to grow.
The most dominant plant species in the Teide National Park are the Teide white broom (Spartocytisus supranubius), which has a white and pink flower; the Canary Island wallflower (Erysimum scoparium), which has white and violet flowers; and the Teide bugloss (Echium wildpretii), whose red flowers form a pyramid up to 3m in height. The Teide daisy (Argyranthemum teneriffae) can be found at altitudes close to 3,600m above sea level. The Teide violet (Viola cheiranthifolia) can be found right up to the summit of the volcano, making it the highest flowering plant in Spain.
These plants are adapted to the tough environmental conditions on the volcano such as high altitude, intense sunlight, extreme temperature variations, and lack of moisture. Adaptations include acquiring semi-spherical forms, acquiring a downy or waxy cover, reducing the exposed leaf area, and having a high flower production. Flowering takes place in the late spring or early summer, in the months of May and June.
The Teide National Park contains a huge range of invertebrate fauna, over 40% of which are endemic species, with 70 species only being found in the national park. The invertebrate fauna include spiders, beetles, dipterans, hemipterans, and hymenopterae.
In contrast, Teide national park has only a limited variety of vertebrate fauna. Ten species of bird nest in the park. These include the blue chaffinch (Fringilla teydea teydea); Berthelot's pipit (Anthus berthelotii berthelotii); the Atlantic canary (Serinus canaria); and a subspecies of kestrel (Falco tinnunculus canariensis).
Three endemic reptile species are also found in the park – the Canary Island lizard (Gallotia galloti galloti), the Canary Island wall gecko (Tarentola delalandii), and the ini °° Canary Island skink (Chalcides viridanus viridanus).
The only mammals native to the park are bats, the most common species of which is Leisler's bat (Nyctalus leisleri). Other mammals such as the mouflon, the rabbit, the house mouse, the black rat, the feral cat, and the Algerian hedgehog have all been introduced to the park.
Scientific landmark
The similarity between environmental conditions and geological Teide National Park and the planet Mars have turned this spot volcanic reference point for studies related to the red planet.
The analogies between the red planet and parts of Tenerife make the island the ideal place for testing instruments that will travel to Mars and reveal past or present life on Mars. In 2010 a research team tested at Las Cañadas del Teide, the Raman instrument to be sent in the next expedition to Mars, ESA-NASA ExoMars from 2016-2018.
In 2011 a team of United Kingdom researchers visited the national park in June to test a method for finding life on Mars and finding places to try in 2012, new robotic vehicles.
Tenerife
Tenerife is the largest and most populated island of the seven Canary Islands. It is also the most populated island of Spain, with a land area of 2,034.38 square kilometres (785 sq mi) and 898,680 inhabitants, 43 percent of the total population of the Canary Islands. Tenerife is the largest and most populous island of Macaronesia.
About five million tourists visit Tenerife each year, the most of any of the Canary Islands. It is one of the most important tourist destinations in Spain and the world. Tenerife hosts one of the world's largest carnivals and the Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is working to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Served by two airports, Tenerife North Airport and Tenerife South Airport, Tenerife is the economic centre of the archipelago. The 1977 collision of two Boeing 747 passenger jets at Tenerife North Airport, resulting in 583 deaths, remains the deadliest aviation accident in world history.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the capital of the island and the seat of the island council (cabildo insular). The city is capital of the autonomous community of Canary Islands (shared with Las Palmas), sharing governmental institutions such as presidency and ministries. Between the 1833 territorial division of Spain and 1927, Santa Cruz de Tenerife was the sole capital of the Canary Islands. In 1927 the Crown ordered that the capital of the Canary Islands be shared, as it remains at present. Santa Cruz contains the modern Auditorio de Tenerife, the architectural symbol of the Canary Islands.
The island is home to the University of La Laguna; founded in 1792 in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, it is the oldest university in the Canaries. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city is the second to have been founded on the island, and is the third of the archipelago. The city of La Laguna was capital of the Canary Islands before Santa Cruz replaced it in 1833.
Teide National Park, a World Heritage Site in the center of the island, has Teide, the highest elevation of Spain, the highest of the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the third-largest volcano in the world from its base. Also located on the island, Macizo de Anaga since 2015 has been designated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It has the largest number of endemic species in Europe.
Canary Islands, Spain
The Canary Islands (Spanish: Las Islas Canarias) also known as The Canaries (Spanish: Las Canarias), are an archipelago and autonomous community of Spain located on the Atlantic Ocean, 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of Morocco. The Canaries are among the outermost regions (OMR) of the European Union proper. It is also one of the eight regions with special consideration of historical nationality recognized as such by the Spanish Government.
The main islands are (from largest to smallest) Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro. The archipelago also includes a number of islands and islets: La Graciosa, Alegranza, Isla de Lobos, Montaña Clara, Roque del Oeste and Roque del Este. In ancient times, the island chain was often referred to as "the Fortunate Isles". The Canary Islands are the most southerly region of Spain and the largest and most populated archipelago of the Macaronesia region.
The archipelago's beaches, climate and important natural attractions, especially Maspalomas in Gran Canaria and Teide National Park and Mount Teide (a World Heritage Site) in Tenerife (the third tallest volcano in the world measured from its base on the ocean floor), make it a major tourist destination with over 12 million visitors per year, especially Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. The islands have a subtropical climate, with long hot summers and moderately warm winters. The precipitation levels and the level of maritime moderation varies depending on location and elevation. Green areas as well as desert exist on the archipelago. Due to their location above the temperature inversion layer, the high mountains of these islands are ideal for astronomical observation. For this reason, two professional observatories, Teide Observatory on the island of Tenerife and Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, have been built on the islands.
The capital of the Autonomous Community is shared by the cities of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which in turn are the capitals of the provinces of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Province of Las Palmas. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has been the largest city in the Canaries since 1768, except for a brief period in the 1910s. Between the 1833 territorial division of Spain and 1927 Santa Cruz de Tenerife was the sole capital of the Canary Islands. In 1927 a decree ordered that the capital of the Canary Islands be shared, as it remains at present. The third largest city of the Canary Islands is San Cristóbal de La Laguna (a World Heritage Site) on Tenerife. This city is also home to the Consejo Consultivo de Canarias, which is the supreme consultative body of the Canary Islands.
During the time of the Spanish Empire, the Canaries were the main stopover for Spanish galleons on their way to the Americas, which came south to catch the prevailing northeasterly trade winds.