Naval Museum
Historic naval collection of ship models, maps and instruments, home to the oldest surviving map of the Americas.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Naval Museum in Madrid follows a stained sheet of parchment from the hands of Juan de la Cosa, a Cantabrian sailor who crossed the Atlantic with Christopher Columbus, drawing it in the year 1500 in the port of El Puerto de Santa María. It traces the map's disappearance for centuries and its resurfacing in a Paris junk shop in 1832, where the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt recognized what a Dutch diplomat had bought as scrap. Listen for how Spain reclaimed the map by royal order and brought it home to Madrid.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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