The persistence of the Guerau plan (1644) in the cartography of the City of Mallorca

Abstract

After a project of a plan in a project of fortification in 1596, the first printed plan of the City of Mallorca, now Palma, was created by the priest Antoni Guerau (1644) and it could be paired with another painted map attributed to Marc Cotto (1650ca). The design of both maps had an important influence in the subsequent cartography of the city gathered by J.Tous (2009). In this paper, a dozen of plans are analyzed; most of them are military coming from French and Spanish archives. The design of Guerau was maintained until mid eighteenth century when the engineers of the Barcelona Academy started to intervene. The plan by L. Scheidnagel (1871) could be considered the precursor of the technical modernity. We have used cartometry tools to trace the evolution of the design.

Keywords: Palma, historic cartography, Antoni Guerau, cartometry, poliorcetics.