España desde el aire- La época de los conquistadores
A partir de 1492, la Península Ibérica experimentó dos siglos de influencia sin igual. Las coronas de Castilla y Aragón se unen con el matrimonio de Isabel I de Castilla y Fernando II de Aragón. El papa Alejandro VI les confiere el título de Reyes Católicos. Las fuerzas combinadas de estas dos familias permitieron la caída de la Granada musulmana, el último bastión árabe en territorio español, poniendo fin a una "reconquista" que duró casi ocho siglos.
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00:00Spain from the air, its history.
00:19At the end of the 15th century, the marriage between Isabel de Castilla and Fernando de Aragón
00:34sealed the most powerful alliance of Christian kingdoms that has ever existed in the Iberian Peninsula.
00:39After taking control of most of the Spanish territory,
00:47the monarchs decided to finance the trip of one of the most famous explorers in history,
00:52Cristóbal Colón.
00:58The discovery of the New World by this captain of the ship Genoese
01:02opened an era of exploration and territorial conquest never seen before on the planet.
01:07Throughout the following centuries, the conquerors would bring wealth and unprecedented power to the Iberian monarchs.
01:19The latter developed their maritime powers, built imposing palaces and fortresses,
01:27and imposed their cultural domination all over the world.
01:32Flying over the Iberian Peninsula today, we can still contemplate the legacy of that century of Spanish gold in the territory.
01:39The time of the conquerors.
01:52Professor Juan Luis Carriazo Rubio is a specialist in the history of the conquerors at the University of Huelva.
02:02Today he is preparing to discover his country from a new angle.
02:17Well, it's been quite a few years studying the history of these territories,
02:24in the archives, in the libraries, with very old papers,
02:29and it's a very different feeling to see them from the air.
02:33Places that are places full of history and meaning for someone who is dedicated every day to research.
02:50Look, Carlos, there in front you have the refinery, okay?
02:55This is exactly the point, this confluence of the Tinto and Odiel rivers,
03:00the place where the ships of Colón, the Pinta, the Niña, the Santa María left off.
03:11On August 3, 1492, just before dawn,
03:15Cristóbal Colón ordered his crew to raise anchors and raise the sails of his three caravans,
03:20and the sails whipped by the Crown of Castile.
03:24Hoping to discover a new route to the Indies that would lead them to the silk, the spices and the gold,
03:30the navigator and his crew boarded the Iberian coast before sailing west.
03:39They left through this estuary towards the unknown Atlantic Ocean at that time,
03:45and this is where the sailors of these populations of Palos de la Frontera, of Moguer and of Huelva,
03:53who made up most of the crew of Colón, would go.
03:5690 men who operated the three ships, approximately,
04:00and of which 90, 70 came from these riverside towns of the Tinto.
04:08As the land disappeared in the distance,
04:12Cristóbal Colón knew that he was at the beginning of a dangerous adventure.
04:17But for the sailor Genovese, it was the end of eight years of negotiations and failures.
04:22He also knew that this trip would have been impossible without the valuable support of the members of a small Franciscan monastery called La Rábida.
04:31La Rábida, Faroe in Arabic, was founded in 1261 to protect the Franciscan religious
04:37from the pirates who looted the southern coast of the peninsula.
04:46The monastery, as we know it today, was built on a Muslim building at the end of the 14th century.
05:01This monastery acquired a special relevance
05:08when in 1485, Cristóbal Colón, coming from Portugal,
05:16discouraged because they did not support his project,
05:22came to take refuge in this monastery.
05:27Fray Antonio de Marchena, a character understood in nautical letters,
05:32welcomed him. At the same time, the prior of the monastery, Fray Juan Pérez,
05:38who had been the accountant of the queen in his youth,
05:43and later his confessor, supported him by interceding for him before the queen.
05:51And the queen granted him three caravels here in the port of Palos
05:58to be able to undertake the journey.
06:02That is why La Rábida is so close to the discovery of the New World.
06:09The Spanish Monarchy
06:14On April 17, 1492, the Spanish Monarchy signed the capitulations of Santa Fe,
06:20which officially granted Cristóbal Colón the right to explore a new commercial route to the Indies.
06:28To organize his trip, Cristóbal Colón went back to the Franciscan monks
06:33and turned La Rábida into his headquarters.
06:36Colón is a foreigner. No one will open the door to Colón thanks to the Franciscans.
06:42The Pinzón brothers welcome Colón's proposal, support it,
06:46and thanks to that it will be possible to carry it out.
06:49Because Colón is a visionary, but he is not a leader.
06:53Martín Alonso Pinzón is a leader.
06:55He is a highly respected person in all the surrounding towns,
06:59with a lot of experience in the world of the sea,
07:02who participates not only in the ability to attract volunteers,
07:06but even economically in the company of Colón.
07:10And well, he, along with his brother Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, will pilot the caravels.
07:20Seen from our present, the trip is a real adventure.
07:23COLOMBIAN MOUNTAINS
07:31Cristóbal Colón arrived in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492,
07:36convinced that he had discovered a region far from the East.
07:45The adventurer would not spend much time only from the discovery of those distant lands.
07:50On June 7, 1494, the Catholic kings and the Portuguese crown
07:55signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, for which the world was divided.
08:01The lands that discovered to the west of this line would return to the crown of Spain.
08:06Those of the East, to the Portuguese, who discovered in 1500 the coasts of present-day Brazil.
08:12IBERIA
08:17The promise of finding inexhaustible wealth in these new territories
08:21spread rapidly through the Iberian Peninsula and all of Europe.
08:26And in 1507, cartographers drew the first outlines of the Americas.
08:31MADRID
08:41Attracted by the opportunity to make a fortune quickly and obtain power and prestige,
08:46a new family of explorers would be born, the Conquistadors.
08:51Passionate adventurers, most of these mercenaries came from a poor and arid region
08:56that extends between Lisbon and Madrid, Extremadura.
09:01EXTREMADURA
09:06Today it is said that in the 16th century, all the peoples of Extremadura
09:09sent at least one of their men to the New World.
09:16It really is a very characteristic landscape,
09:18with a vegetation that takes us to a time when livestock farming was fundamental.
09:25TRUJILLO
09:28There we see Trujillo with its monuments, practically stopped in time,
09:32in the 16th century, which was the great time of splendor of Trujillo.
09:41Trujillo is the birthplace of Francisco Pizarro,
09:44one of the most famous conquistadors in history,
09:47who took possession of the Inca Empire and offered Peru the Crown of Castile.
09:55As we fly over the Plaza Mayor de Trujillo,
09:58we look at the different palaces built thanks to the numerous expeditions of the conquistador.
10:14Well, here we are in this wonderful Plaza Mayor de Trujillo,
10:19a tumultuous square where there were so many markets,
10:24where so many palaces were built, where so many conquistadors,
10:28so many Peruvians from the American continent, who returned rich here with their fortunes.
10:37Professor Esteban Miracaballos,
10:39a great specialist in the relations between Spain and North America in the 16th century,
10:44is the author of a biography of Francisco Pizarro.
10:49Well, this is the Palace of the Marquis de la Conquista,
10:52ordered to be built by Hernando Pizarro, the brother of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro,
10:57and by his wife, Francisca Pizarro Yupanqui.
11:01It was built in the third quarter of the 16th century and is Renaissance-style.
11:06Well, his shields appear, the shield that the family had before the conquest of the New World,
11:13and finally, on top of the corner balcony,
11:17there is the Inca Tahualpa, putting his hands in a gold chest,
11:21eight chained indigenous curacas or rellezuelos,
11:26and on top of that is the city of Tumbes,
11:29which was the first city occupied by Francisco Pizarro when he arrived in Peru.
11:36A conquistador is a person willing to die or to kill for honor and fortune,
11:43and Pizarro was neither more nor less than that, a conquistador,
11:46a person who was willing to risk his life for honor and fortune,
11:55honor for himself and for his lineage, for his family.
12:01All of Extremadura was then an emigrant province,
12:05because the benefits that the poor land itself gave,
12:10were given by absentee beneficiaries who did not live in Extremadura,
12:14but who lived in Seville or Madrid,
12:17and therefore the Extremeños were forced to emigrate.
12:21That explains why so many Extremeños went in search of the Americas.
12:31At the beginning of the 16th century,
12:33the conquerors intensified their exploration of the New World
12:36and offered the throne of Castile an increasingly extensive territory.
12:41Thanks to a series of alliances and marriages,
12:44King Charles V, heir to the family of the Habsburgs
12:47and future emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,
12:50obtained in 1516 the crown of Spain and all the lands discovered in the Americas.
13:00All the wealth brought from those lands would be found from then on in Seville,
13:05which became the economic center of the kingdom.
13:09We are going to enter the Guadalquivir,
13:12as the ancient Indian fleets did on their return from America,
13:17through the town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda,
13:19a town that controlled the mouth of the river.
13:25The access to the Guadalquivir river through Sanlúcar
13:29was a complicated access,
13:31because there were sand banks that made it difficult for ships to enter.
13:37It took the help of very expert pilots
13:40to be able to introduce the ships through the mouth on the way to Seville.
13:48Upstream in the estuary of the Guadalquivir river,
13:51Seville had been founded by the Romans
13:53and had developed over the centuries of Muslim presence.
13:58The city had an ideal location to protect the nobility
14:01from enemy attacks and piracy.
14:03In the port, the ships of the conquerors,
14:06empty of their exotic treasures of gold and other precious metals,
14:10would soon cross ships loaded with slaves.
14:14Seville was a safe port,
14:16and above all the great city that centralized trade with America,
14:21the control of trade with America, from the beginning of the 16th century.
14:34Economist and historian Manuel González Mariscal
14:37specializes in the transformation of Seville.
14:45He has met historian Juan Manuel Castillo Rubio,
14:48with whom he studies the golden age of the city.
14:55The conquest of America will mean a fundamental change,
15:00not only for Seville, but for the entire European economy.
15:04The silver will come from America to Seville,
15:07and then here in Seville,
15:09that silver will fund the wars of the monarchy in Europe.
15:14It will also be used to buy spices and Asian products in Lisbon,
15:19and it will also be used to buy industrial products in northern Europe.
15:26Throughout the 16th century,
15:28Seville developed until it became one of the most prosperous cities in Europe.
15:34The successor of Charles V, King Philip II,
15:37ordered the construction of a new merchandise farm in the center of the city.
15:44Declared a World Heritage Site,
15:47the building hosts the archive of India,
15:49with nearly 90 million documents
15:52that constitute the memory of the colonial empire and its administration.
15:57Moving to India, as it was called at the time,
16:00was never easy administratively,
16:03and the House of Contracts, among its prerogatives,
16:06had the power to say who could and who could not go to India.
16:10The importance of the House of Contracts
16:12is that a unique administration is generated
16:16for everything that will happen in relation to Europe and America.
16:21What is being tried to avoid is that the private initiative
16:24takes the lead of the monarchy,
16:26once they see that there can really be a lot of wealth in America.
16:31When the King of Portugal died in 1580,
16:34Philip II achieved the unification of the two crowns through a marriage alliance.
16:39He regained the Portuguese strategic trade points
16:42and reigned from then on over vast territories around the world.
16:45It was then said that the sun never set in the empire of Philip II.
16:51With the hope of taking advantage of this momentum of prosperity,
16:54bankers, merchants and foreign artists hurried to Seville
16:59and enriched their culture and architecture.
17:04The Genoese and other merchants, and the bourgeoisie in general,
17:08try to impress with their ways of inhabiting the city.
17:12And in that sense they are often ahead of the nobility,
17:15because they are going to introduce the Renaissance modes in Spain.
17:18And they are going to help introduce sculptors, architects, artists,
17:22Genoese, but in general Italian,
17:24and then the nobility will imitate it and will also hire the same people.
17:27And you can see it in their palaces, you can see it in their houses.
17:30They are already using a language different from Gothic,
17:32which was the one that royalty had been sponsoring in the 15th century.
17:37The protected situation of the river port that brought fortune to Seville
17:41also caused its fall.
17:44Merchants demanded larger and larger ships.
17:47Access to Seville became very complicated,
17:50so the Spaniards began to look for alternatives.
17:54Cádiz is a city by the sea,
17:56with a maritime tradition of many centuries,
17:59with colonies of foreign merchants,
18:02from different parts of Europe,
18:04with intense commercial traffic,
18:07with North Africa, with the Canary Islands,
18:09and of course, in the following centuries, increasing that importance.
18:14With caravans full of gold, silver and spices,
18:18looting in its port,
18:20Cádiz aroused the greed of powerful foreigners,
18:23but also of pirates.
18:30At the end of the 16th century,
18:32he received the visit of the English corsair, Sir Francis Drake,
18:36who in this bay destroyed much of the Spanish fleet.
18:40A few years later, in 1596,
18:42there was a great English assault on the city of Cádiz,
18:45which was completely occupied, looted,
18:49more than 300 houses were burned.
18:54At the end of the 16th century,
18:56as happened in other important cities of the peninsula,
18:59the Spaniards decided to build two imposing forces in Cádiz.
19:04Santa Catalina and San Sebastián.
19:11For the historian and specialist in architecture, José Manuel Aladro,
19:15the best way to understand the power of dissolution of these structures
19:19is to put yourself in context.
19:22During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries,
19:25the bay of Cádiz,
19:27we also remember that it was the field of continuous confrontation
19:31between foreign fleets and Spanish fleets.
19:36From this point on, it is understood
19:39that the castles were part of a territorial defensive system.
19:43Between the different towers there was visual communication,
19:46that is, the first tower that saw the possibility
19:50of an enemy fleet approaching,
19:53could communicate through fire signals,
19:57could communicate to towers much further away,
20:00so that the defense system
20:02allowed not only to repel an attack,
20:05but immediately to communicate to the different populations
20:08that there was a possible maritime threat.
20:14In fact, we should have dressed as pirates.
20:19The strategic position of these two fortresses
20:22offered Cádiz and its population the protection they needed
20:25and allowed merchants to enter and leave the bay with complete security.
20:30The small port city began to prosper.
20:35The bay of Cádiz receives the head of the Indian fleet,
20:39that is, officially the ships on the way to India,
20:42the entire commercial fleet,
20:44begin to leave the bay of Cádiz.
20:47And at the beginning of the 18th century,
20:49Cádiz receives the house of employment,
20:51and the city becomes a real commercial emporium,
20:54one of the largest commercial capitals in the world at that time.
21:00Maritime cities like Cádiz were not the only ones
21:03that took advantage of the influence of wealth
21:06during this century of Spanish gold.
21:08To transport goods from coastal areas,
21:11the authorities created the first road network
21:13for the commercial transport of Spain,
21:15the road network.
21:17The territory became a real mosaic of markets.
21:20In the center of the country,
21:22a city presided and guided the whole set,
21:25Madrid.
21:29The city became rich and entered a period of literary,
21:32artistic and architectural projection.
21:36Flying over Madrid today,
21:38we discover the monuments whose construction began
21:41under the reigns of Charles V and Philip II.
21:44The Royal Palace, one of the largest in Europe.
21:50The Plaza Mayor
21:54and the Palacio del Pardo,
21:56built on top of a medieval castle,
21:58are still witnesses of this era of splendor.
22:05At the beginning of the 17th century,
22:07despite the wealth brought by the conquerors,
22:10the growing expenses of wars and the protection of the kingdom
22:13would seal the fate of the crown.
22:17This era, marked by an increase in inequalities
22:20among the rest of the population,
22:22would also be the beginning of the end of the Spanish gold century,
22:25which would tell one of the most notable authors of literature.
22:31We already see the mills of Consuegra,
22:37with their very characteristic silhouettes.
22:45And those mills can only remind us
22:48of some famous episode of the Quixote,
22:52of the universal work of Miguel de Cervantes.
22:58José Garciacano grew up in the shadows of the Consuegra mills.
23:02He is a specialist in the history of La Mancha
23:05during the gold century.
23:08That is the typical image of Don Quixote.
23:11In fact, Consuegra has served as a stage
23:14for a multitude of films, videos and promotions about Don Quixote,
23:18the most famous character of La Mancha in history.
23:24Cervantes was a tax collector, he worked in this region.
23:28Possibly he also passed through Consuegra
23:30and possibly he met these mills centuries ago
23:33and who knows if they inspired him to introduce them
23:36in that immortal work that is Don Quixote de la Mancha.
23:41Parodying the drifts of Spanish society,
23:44Don Quixote, Cervantes' knightly hero,
23:47wanders through the lands of La Mancha,
23:49helps the weakest
23:51and starts useless battles against windmills.
23:56His madness became the symbol of a Spanish population
23:59that was desperate in this time of decline.
24:04The gold century also has a final stage.
24:07When the gold century shows us,
24:09in the 17th century, that Spain was going wrong.
24:12That is, the king had spent a lot of money in wars,
24:15in companies that had indeed been left behind
24:18and what they had done was lose money.
24:21And those taxes that farmers and ranchers
24:24continually paid were lost in the royal arches.
24:27That farmer, that rancher,
24:29did not have to give up and could not pay taxes.
24:32Those workers, that plain people,
24:35which is also what Cervantes teaches us in Don Quixote,
24:39is angry.
24:41And Don Quixote also shows us perfectly
24:43the difference of classes.
24:45How he makes fun, in some way, with the character of Quixote,
24:48of the nobles, of those nobles and Hidalgos.
24:50That many Hidalgos, apparently,
24:52we always think they had a great fortune,
24:54it has nothing to do with it.
24:56Don Quixote is a perfect example of Hidalgo coming to less,
24:59of Hidalgo who has nothing to say
25:01and who only lived his old glories,
25:03of the name, of the ancestors.
25:05It was a part of society already decadent,
25:07already very changed, very different from what it had been.
25:11At the end of the 17th century,
25:13in the absence of heirs,
25:15the house of the Habsburgs lost the crown of Spain.
25:18The loss of wealth from the Americas
25:21and the repeated conflicts in Europe
25:23weakened the kingdom.
25:25And Spain lost its status of great power.
25:31The time of the conquerors had ended.
25:34But his thirst for gold and conquest
25:36has never changed the appearance of Spain
25:38and has allowed the projection of its culture
25:40all over the world.
26:08Transcription by ESO. Translation by —