Guillermo Schulz. The valuable geognostic interpretations of a German from the northwest of Spain (1832-1835)

Abstract

Between 1832 and 1835, Guillermo Schulz, a German scientist and author of the first geognostic description of Galicia (Schulz, 1835), travelled around Galicia making deliberate assessments and discovering many physiographic singularities and regularities that constitute a regional geomorphological synthesis. This perspective has not been sufficiently recognized even though it constitutes a milestone in Spanish scientific history.

This study has analyzed his main works, especially his field notebooks (Schulz, 1992a and 1992b), with the aim of assessing his role as a pioneer of the heritage perspective of Earth Sciences in our country. It has also applied TIG tools to carefully recognize some of the sites he highlighted. The results indicate that, as a discoverer of significant mineral wealth and its historical perspective in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, a describer of the layout and sequence of the rock, a developer of a geognosy whose contributions are of notable interest to geographers and as a pioneer of the heritage vision of geodiversity in Spain, the routes and points of interest highlighted in his tours should form part of a network of spaces of interest for their enhancement and their geotourism projection.