Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts
the stars to flight.

And, lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Household net financial wealth at the end of 2025 was 11% up on 2024 and household debt, in relative to GDP terms, fell to 42.8%, the lowest level since the end of 1999. Which certainly sounds like good news. And would be if everyone in Spain had benefitted equally. But . . . The poor are always with us. Not everyone has assets that can be revaluated upwards.

The USA is considering withdrawing one of its military bases in Spain as “punishment” for its non-cooperation in the Iran War. The threat comes as Spain appears to be leading a shift in Europe away from Donald Trump’s USA. 

Lenox Napier has kindly supplied me with along article from a Galician journal I hadn’t known of. It reports fully on a recent DNA finding that supports the thesis the Christopher Columbus (Cristobal Colón in Spanish) was a Gallego. There’s a translation of the article below this post. Perhaps the museum in my barrio of Poio – in the house alleged to be that of his birth – will now see an upturn in visitor numbers. To be honest, these have never been high, one reason being that many/most city residents aren’t even aware of its existence, across the river. BTW: The museum is in the parish of Portosanto and it’s generally accepted that his main ship – the Santa María – was built there – originally as La Gallega.

Lenox is informative here, too. On Madrid’s cafés and bars.

Europe

What Trump gets wrong about NATO.

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism.

• Talks delayed
• Really a ruse?
• Concern re renewed conflict
• The USA is to release some of Iran’s frozen assets. Perhaps.

The United States of Trump USA

The excellent Politics Girl takes on Karoline Leavitt and explains here why Trump has actually achieved even less than a Pyrrhic victory.

Just a reminder for those who want to check relevant podcasts on Podbean or videos on YouTube:-

• The Daily Beast Podcast/Video
• Inside Trump’s Head Podcast/Video
• The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent Podcast
• The Rest is Politics US Podcast/Video
• The DST Network Podcast

Quote of the Day

What an amazing – unique? – democracy the USA is. It puts a man of Trump’s character in power not just once but twice and then – after finding out what the appalling consequences of this are – can’t take power away from him despite his low levels of voter support.

Spanish

• Hastiado: Jaded, (world-)weary, disgusted.
• Al acecho: On the prowl, on the lookout, in ambush.
• Cancha: Court, field, pitch

You Have to Laugh

Another uncomfortable Finn

Finally . . .

The Galician Columbus/Colón: A new DNA study suggests that Christopher Columbus/Cristobal Colón was either the Galician nobleman Pedro Madruga or his son.

A great-great-grandson of Columbus shares genetic material with a descendant of the mysterious Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor. Scientists from several universities conclude that there is “for the first time robust genetic support” for the hypothesis that Columbus was, in fact, the nobleman who fought against the Catholic Monarchs or his son.

A new archaeo-genomic study, authored by researchers from the Citogen laboratory and the Complutense University of Madrid, among others, has reignited one of the longest-running debates in world historiography: the true origins of Christopher Columbus.

The research, published as a preprint on bioRxiv a few days ago, analyzes the skeletal remains of seven direct descendants of the admiral buried in the crypt of the Church of Santa María de Gracia in Gelves (Seville), and concludes that Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor, the Galician nobleman known as Pedro Madruga, is the common ancestor that explains the genetic links found between several of these individuals.

The research, led by Isabel Navarro-Vera of the forensic genetics department at Citogen, constitutes the third stage of a project that has been examining the family pantheon of the Counts of Gelves for years, where at least seven direct descendants of Columbus are buried.

Citogen is a leading Spanish laboratory with over 20 years of experience, specializing in clinical, forensic, and reproductive genetics. Located in Zaragoza, it offers high-tech DNA testing services, such as paternity and genetic diagnosis.

José Yravedra Sainz de los Terreros, Professor of Prehistory at the Complutense University of Madrid, also participates in the research team. The other scientists who authored the article are archaeologists and anthropologists working in private institutions.

The specialists applied massively parallel sequencing (MPS) to autosomal markers and X and Y chromosome markers from twelve individuals exhumed in Gelves, seven of whom have already undergone genetic analysis. The results allowed researchers to reconstruct the biological relationships between them and cross-reference this information with extensive documentary genealogies spanning from the 11th to the 18th centuries.

An Unexpected Relationship That Could Change Everything

The key discovery stemmed from a fact no one anticipated: María de Castro Girón de Portugal, Countess Consort of Gelves in the 17th century and belonging to a Galician noble lineage—she was the daughter of the 9th Count of Lemos—shares a biological relationship with Jorge Alberto de Portugal, the third Count of Gelves and great-great-grandson of Columbus, who died in the 16th century. The relationship between the two was not documented in any historical record, so the team had to trace the genealogical lines of both families for generations to identify the common ancestor that would explain this genomic coincidence.

After exhaustive computational modeling applied to a sixteen-generation family tree, the analysis unequivocally pointed to Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor. It should be noted that the tomb of Xoán Mariño de Soutomaior, a relative of Pedro Madruga, was exhumed a few years ago.

When researchers applied the so-called Virtual Knockout technique, which involves virtually removing an individual from the family tree to measure the impact on relatedness coefficients, the exclusion of Pedro Madruga completely erased the genetic link between the two individuals. No other ancestor was able to replace that DNA link.

The theory that Columbus was of Galician origin and that he could even be Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor himself—Lord of Soutomaior and a prominent figure in the Galician nobility of the 15th century, who disappeared from historical records around 1486—was first formulated at the beginning of the 20th century and has been developed by several Galician researchers over the decades. Until now, however, it lacked any kind of genetic support. The authors of the preprint state that their results provide “for the first time robust genetic support” for this hypothesis, linking the Columbus lineage to noble houses in northern Spain, specifically the Sotomayor (Galicia) and Zúñiga (Navarra) families.

The study also identified and confirmed several of the individuals found in the crypt. Among them were Jorge Alberto de Portugal, whose identity had already been published in a previous phase of the project, and Isabel de la Cueva, the first wife of the 6th Count of Gelves and a direct descendant of Columbus, as well as María de Castro herself. The concordance between anthropological data, carbon-14 dating, isotopic analysis, and DNA results allowed for this identification with a high degree of forensic certainty.

An unresolved scientific debate

Nevertheless, the scientific community urges caution before rewriting history books. The preprint itself acknowledges that the evidence is indirect, obtained through descendants and not from Columbus’s own DNA, and that its conclusions require independent verification. Since it has not yet undergone peer review, the study is considered preliminary.

This is not the only recent work on the admiral’s origins. The team of Professor José A. Lorente, from the University of Granada, has spent decades studying the remains attributed to Columbus in the Seville Cathedral, exhumed in 2003. In 2024, a controversial RTVE documentary presented their preliminary conclusions, pointing to a Mediterranean Sephardic origin, a claim that was also criticized by experts because the complete data had not been published in any scientific journal.

Thus, the Italian hypothesis remains the majority view in historiography. Columbus himself declared in his 1498 will that he was born in Genoa, and this documentary evidence continues to be the main argument for those who defend the Genoese origin.

It should also be remembered that a 2011 study published in the European Journal of Human Genetics analyzed the Y chromosome of almost 350 men with the surnames Colom and Colombo in different European countries, concluding that the Catalan lineage presented less genetic diversity than the Italian one, which would theoretically facilitate the identification of the Columbus’s Y-DNA, if he were of Iberian origin. But that study also failed to provide a definitive conclusion on another theory: Catalan origin.

What has changed in recent years is the quantity and quality of available genetic evidence, although none of it has yet reached the level of certainty required for a shift in historiographical consensus. Scientists in the field unanimously demand that raw data be published in open repositories, that analyses be replicated by independent laboratories, and that databases of reference historical populations—medieval Sephardic Jews, Ligurians, Catalans, Galicians—be incorporated to contextualize the results with statistical rigor.

For now, Galicia has one of the most concrete pieces of genetic evidence published to date. It is pending scientific validation, but it is a step that proponents of the Galician theory have been waiting for for centuries.

Who was Pedro Madruga, and what evidence links him to Christopher Columbus?

The Lord of Soutomaior was one of the most powerful and controversial figures in 15th-century Galicia. In 1486, he vanished from historical records without a trace. That same year, Christopher Columbus appeared before the Catholic Monarchs.

Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor was born around 1430 into one of the most influential noble families in Galicia. Lord of Soutomaior Castle, on the banks of the Verdugo River in what is now the province of Pontevedra, he controlled a vast territory between the Miño River and the Rías Baixas for decades. He was a man of his time: a warrior, ambitious, and fickle in his loyalties. He fought in the Castilian civil wars, made pacts with Portugal when it suited him, fought against rival nobility, and was one of the feudal lords against whom the popular Irmandiño revolt rose up. His nickname, Pedro Madruga—referring to the one who arrives before anyone else—perfectly summed up his character.

And then, around 1486, he disappeared. For a nobleman of his rank at that time, that absence is, in itself, extraordinary.

That same year, 1486, Christopher Columbus first appeared at the court of the Catholic Monarchs to present his project of sailing to the Indies. Chronology is the central element of the Galician hypothesis: one leaves and the other arrives, without ever coinciding in time or space. There is no possible overlap between the two documented lives.

The theory was first formulated by the historian Celso García de la Riega from Pontevedra at the beginning of the 20th century and taken up by various Galician researchers later on. According to this interpretation, Columbus would have been Pedro Madruga reinvented: a nobleman who had fallen out of favor with the Catholic Monarchs—against whom he had fought—and who needed to erase his past in order to operate within the Castilian court. The deliberate concealment of his origins, acknowledged even by his own son Hernando in the biography he wrote about him, would fit perfectly into this scenario.

Clues in the Language

Beyond chronology, linguists have provided one of the strongest arguments in the debate. The texts written by Columbus—letters, diaries, notes—are written in Castilian Spanish, but contain turns of phrase and expressions characteristic of Galician-Portuguese that are not easily explained by a native speaker of Ligurian or Italian, even though Columbus claimed to have spent time in Lisbon before emigrating to Castile. Some researchers have identified syntactic and lexical constructions that point to someone who learned Castilian Spanish as a second language, his first being Galician-Portuguese.

Columbus’s demonstrated knowledge of the sea also fits better with an Atlantic than a Mediterranean origin. Galicia and Portugal in that century were the world epicenter of nautical exploration, and a nobleman from the Galician coast with Portuguese ties would have had natural access to the routes, maps, and circles of navigators that Columbus clearly possessed.

The Coat of Arms and the Treatment by the Catholic Monarchs

Two further details have fueled researchers’ suspicions for years. When the Catholic Monarchs granted Columbus the right to bear a coat of arms, the admiral incorporated into the design some gold bands whose origin has never been satisfactorily explained from the Genoese perspective. These bands, however, are part of the traditional heraldry of the Sotomayor family.

The other detail is more subtle but persistent: the court treated Columbus from the beginning as someone they knew, not as a foreign sailor of humble origins arriving with a far-fetched idea. Some historians interpret this familiarity as only making sense if Columbus was someone Isabella and Ferdinand had already met before, in a different context and under a different name.

The contra-argument that persists

The Galician hypothesis faces an obstacle that its proponents have not been able to definitively overcome: in his 1498 will, Columbus himself claimed to have been born in Genoa. Supporters of the Genoese origin consider this document the most direct and reliable evidence available.

Galician researchers respond that this testimony is part of the same false identity he allegedly maintained throughout his life: a man who so carefully concealed his past would not reveal it in his will. It is a circular argument that neither side can resolve with documents alone.

Hence, genetics has entered the scene as a potential arbiter. The new study by Navarro et al., published in April 2026, is the first work to provide genomic evidence compatible with this hypothesis. Still preliminary, still awaiting peer review, but sufficient to keep the five-century-old unanswered question open.

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.

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If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you.