The First Cartographies of Teruel, Main Contributions for Restoring the City’s Historical Image Miguel Sancho Mir 1(&) and Beatriz Martín Domínguez 2 1 University of Zaragoza, Saragossa, Spain misanmi@unizar.es 2 Polytechnic University School of La Almunia, La Almunia de Doña Godina, Spain Abstract. The research focuses on analysing the first plans of the City of Teruel, built in the early nineteenth century, in the context of the Wars of Independence, two by the Spanish army and another by the French. These three cartographies provide complementary planimetric information on urban mor- phology and the surrounding landscape due to their different scales and the corresponding associated generalisation. The cartography, by its very nature and purpose, is presented as the main source of information on the evolution of the urban form and these documents compile essential data to recover the city’s historical image, since they capture many elements missing today that would be dif ficult to convey with only the other available sources. Keywords: Historical cartography Á Urban image Á 19th century Á War of independence Á Teruel 1 Introduction The first cartographies the City of Teruel appear at the beginning of the 19th century. The three urban cartographies to be studied are dated in 1811 and, by their different scales, provide complementary planimetric information on urban morphology and the surrounding landscape. The previous sources, archives and bibliographies, are mainly written documents. One exception to be taken into account is the illustrations that accompany some of the work carried out by scholars and travellers at the end of the 18th and 19th centuries. An example of this is the drawing of the western area pub- lished by Antonio Ponz in 1785 (Fig. 1), a view in which some of Teruel’s most representative monuments, such as the Convent of the Barefoot Carmelite Fathers, the Capuchins and Santo Domingo convents, the Conciliar Seminary and the towers of the Saviour and the Cathedral, with the unique aspect that many of them have disappeared, mainly due to the different war processes that have taken place in the city. Although in many cases, the city’s representations or descriptions are far from plausible, so care is required in interpreting them. An idealised vision of the perception of the city from the Vega del Rio is described in an anonymous manuscript from the end of the 18th century: © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Agustín-Hernández et al. (Eds.): EGA 2020, SSDI 7, pp. 273–284, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47987-9_22