Changes

The need to have works on the national geography had encouraged several countries in the first half of the 20th century to elaborate their own national atlas. In order to unify criteria and thus make the work in different countries comparable, the International Geographical Union (IGU) set up a working group on national atlases in 1956, which would later give way to the Commission on National Atlas. These atlases were then defined as "fundamental and complex geographical atlases of specific countries, containing a summary and generalisation of contemporary scientific knowledge in the field of physical, economic and political geography of the country concerned".

In accordance with these ideas, a Commission on National Atlas was set up at the Spanish Geographic and Cadastral Institute (as it was called in those dates) with the aim of tackling the creation of the National Atlas of Spain. This Commission, made up of a group of renowned geographers with a good knowledge on cartographic language, tried to replace the old concept of written text with the modern concept of the map as a graphic image.

By 1965, the national atlases of Finland, France, Canada, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, USSR, Italy, Australia, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Belgium, UK and Israel had been published, and those of Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland were being delivered as a loose-leaf collection. The latter was the model adopted by the Spanish Commission on National Atlas.

The cartographic techniques used for this edition contributed to the learning and practice of a new working methodology, different from the one that had been used until then, obtaining a considerable improvement in the quality of the final product.

[[File:L 40 horas sol.jpg|left|thumb|300px|Map from sheet 40 showing the average annual sunshine hours at a scale of 1:4,000,000]]

[[File:L 87 nucleos comerciales.jpg|right|thumb|300px|: Map on sheet 87 showing the commercial areas and the main shopping centres at a scale of 1:2,000,000]]

The technique, engraved glass, was used in very few countries at that time and it was necessary to import the patent from Switzerland. The team gained considerable experience and quality in their work. A further advance was the use of the stabilene technique. For the first time, a 1:500,000 scale representation of the entire national territory was achieved. The data were obtained from the National Topographic Map at a scale of 1:50,000, which was completed prior to this work.

Despite the many difficulties that hindered completing this project, the 28 geographical sheets and 24 -out of the initially 72 proposed- thematic sheets were published in 1965. A Geographical Review of 227 pages and a Toponymic Index comprising 176 pages and approximately 40,000 toponyms were published later. The last updates of some of the (non-thematic) geographical sheets were produced in the 1980s.

Although the Atlas remained unfinished due to circumstances beyond the control of the work team, and the tools used for drawing up the maps were considerably improved, the scientific approach with which this work was promoted was well conceived and even ahead of its time. For the first time in Spain, there was a work that synthesised through cartographic language the physical and human geography of the country, essential material for the governmental management of the territory, amongst other aspects.