Fundación Luis Gimenéz Lorente Map Collection

Doctor Luis Giménez Lorente, born on 20 January 1920 in Valencia, a pharmacist by profession with studies in Optics and Audiometry, was keenly interested in travel and in scientific and technological advances.

For years Giménez Lorente devoted his efforts to the search, acquisition, cataloguing and study of Valencian maps from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He often travelled to Italy, England and France, where he trawled bookshops, antique shops, and markets in search of works for his collection. He collected thirty original maps from between 1584 and 1797.

At present, the cartobibliographic archives include the following originals, facsimiles and reproductions: 22 atlases, 90 world maps, 170 printed maps, 77 nautical charts and more than 1000 engravings, plates and books on a wide range of themes, including pharmacy, medicine, national and Valencian history and, of course, cartography and related sciences.

On 11 June 2003, an agreement was signed between Luis Giménez Lorente and the Universitat Politècnica de València, in which he donated his cartobibliographic archives to the university, which undertook to safeguard and preserve, to add to and disseminate them, and to promote the study and research of the collection. A Board of Trustees was created and endowed, based at the School of Geodetic Engineering, a building that was under construction at the time.

This collection has been digitised by the Main Library of the Universitat Politècnica de València and can be consulted through the Riunet bibliographic catalogue.

Source of the text

Villar Cano, M. (2008). La Fundación Luis Giménez Lorente de la Comunidad Valenciana. Revista Catalana de Geografia (IV època, volum XIII, núm. 35). http://www.rcg.cat/articles.php?id=138

Digital Catalogue of Maps

Riunet (UPV Main Library)

Permanent Exhibition

Three map collections are on permanent display on the fourth floor of the School of Geodesy, Cartography and Surveying:

The Valencian map collection (Centuries XVI - XVIII)

The Spanish regional map collection (Centuries XVI - XVIII)

The Portolan chart collection (Centuries XIV - XVI)