Riccardo Riccardi · 1960
Riccardo Riccardi reviews the second edition of A. de Amorim Girão’s Atlas de Portugal, cited as published in 1959. He describes it as substantially revised and expanded from 25 to 40 plates. Additions include historical maps, river basins, rural and urban population, settlement patterns and rural dwellings, agricultural enterprise types, dialects, and more than thirty general and detailed maps of the Azores, Madeira and Portugal’s overseas provinces. Most existing maps were reworked to increase detail or incorporate newer statistics; the geological map draws chiefly on Portugal’s 1952 geological map. Riccardi praises the effectiveness of the population mapping and the brief plate commentaries, now provided in English as well as Portuguese, and notes considerable improvements in technical execution.
João Soukup · 1960
This review discusses the second edition of A. de Amorim Girão's Atlas de Portugal, published in 1958 by the Institute of Geographical Studies of the Faculty of Letters, University of Coimbra. The reviewer examined it at the request of Aroldo de Azevedo, editor of the Boletim Paulista de Geografia. He notes that the second edition differs markedly from the first (1941), though both were prepared under Girão's supervision. The atlas is organized geo-statistically and contains 43 plates, mostly thematic maps and cartograms at 1:1,500,000, together with five geographical maps of the overseas territories and three uncolored cartograms on the origin and evolution of Portugal, Portuguese expansion through discoveries, conquests and colonization, and the 1958 situation of Portuguese lands and Portuguese settlement centers worldwide. The reviewer praises the offset printing, color gradation and legibility of most plates, but criticizes the absence of a general location map, which makes the river profiles and drainage-basin maps difficult for non-Portuguese readers to use, and finds the orographic coloring and block capital lettering of map 2 hard to read. He links the atlas to Bernardino Barros Gomes's 1878 collection of five elementary maps of Portugal and considers the binding and paper suitable for school use, calling the work a notable achievement of Portuguese thematic cartography.
Ena L. Yonge · 1962
The survey reviews the second edition of Aristides de Amorim Girão's Atlas de Portugal, issued for the 1960 commemoration of the fifth centenary of Prince Henry the Navigator's death. The reviewer calls it a great improvement on the 1941 first edition, although a few plates with basic information were retained. The stated aim is to give the world a true picture of Portugal and to show how a nation can remain a complete entity while dispersed worldwide without continuous land boundaries: the first three plates treat the birth and growth of the Portuguese state and its present worldwide distribution, the last five the overseas provinces and adjacent islands. Physical and human geography and the economy receive extensive coverage, agriculture is particularly well shown, and an unusual map records dialects and falares. The general scale is 1:1,500,000 with distribution maps at smaller scales, and text and legends are in Portuguese and English.
