La Mancha Plateau, Spain

The area pictured lies on the southeast end of the La Mancha plateau, Spain. The arid but fertile lands are farmed for wheat, barley, oats and olives, among other crops.

Image credit: European Space Imaging / DigitalGlobe

The Iberian Peninsula

This image from the International Space Station shows the Iberian Peninsula including Spain and Portugal at night.

The lights from human settlements reveal where the major towns and activity are. The large mass of light in the middle is Madrid, Spain’s capital city. The Iberian coastline is heavily populated with Valencia and Barcelona along the Mediterranean Sea prominent at the bottom right of this photo.

Portugal to the west shows similar lighting with the coast from Lisboa to Porto a haze of light.

This astronaut-image taken from 400 km above Earth shows how close the Iberian Peninsula is to Morocco. A thin line of blackness – the Strait of Gibraltar – separates the two.

Another thin line stands out in this picture – Earth’s atmosphere, the green shroud that surrounds and protects our world and the people and animals that live on it.

Photo credit: ESA/NASA

Barcelona, Spain

The Spanish city of Barcelona is pictured in this image captured on 13 September 2010 by Japan’s ALOS satellite. Near the top right corner, the circular Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes was meant to be the city center in the original urban plan. Dominating the left side of the image are the Garraf Massif mountains, their cliffs reaching the Mediterranean coast. Rock quarries and rubbish dumps are degrading the land here, and some of these degraded areas can be seen in the lower left corner as large yellow patches. Along the coast, we can see the Barcelona’s port – one of Europe’s top ten largest container ports. Barcelona-El Prat airport is about 10 km southwest of the city center, across the Llobregat River. On either side of the airport we can see the darker areas of the Llobregat delta.

Photo credit: JAXA/ESA

Balearic Islands

Majorca, Mallorca and Ibiza as seen from the ISS by ESA astronaut André Kuipers during his mission to the orbital outpost, PromISSe.

Photo credit: ESA/NASA

Portugal and Spain

Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) captured this image on 8 April 2012 at 13:05 CEST. The image was transmitted in Ka-band to ESA/ESRIN though direct transmission via Artemis, the ESA Data Relay satellite. The image, which is of nominal quality, shows Portugal and Spain. It is the last Envisat data transmitted via Ka-band before the communication anomaly affected the Envisat satellite.

Photo credit: ESA

Paris to Portugal

European lights seen by André Kuipers from space. Portugal is to the right of the image, and Paris is the glowing light on the left of the image.

Photo credit: ESA/NASA