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Medieval labor guilds encompassed various forms of mutual aid in their coverage, including health, accident, widowhood, orphanage, old age, and poverty insurance. They also addressed situations typical of commercial insurance, such as bankruptcy, theft, assault, and captivity. These provisions included private and family actions (like organizing burials and funerals) and maintained a pious character through charitable and benevolent activities. Not all guilds offered the same level of protection; thus, this paper will examine exceptional cases where labor formations guaranteed their members a high degree of mutualistic commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis has had an asymmetric effect on Spanish and regional/local economies. This study aims to analyze the strategies developed by cooperative wineries in Castilla-La Mancha (CLM) and their impact on performance measurements. The paper opted for an exploratory study based on a compilation of financial statements consisting of the traditional economic-financial profitability ratios (ROA, ROI, ROS) plus a specific analysis, Return of Owner Cooperative (ROC). We have also used two financial measurements: Liquidity and Leverage. Trade dynamism is the hallmark of wine cooperatives in CLM in terms of strategic action in the face of a crisis. Their resilience is patent in the conquest of foreign markets via low unit costs, which have been transferred to sales prices. The paper has implications for the understanding of the resilience of the agricultural cooperatives during the crisis period in question. The consistency of the results provides a context to promote the cooperative model as an essential factor in the social economy. This paper fulfils an identified need to show the cooperative model as a resilient one in the agricultural field and in the context of rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Royal Chapel of Granada has been analysed from political, institutional, and artistic perspectives, yet it has never been studied from an economic point of view. This paper explores its financing from the moment of foundation in 1504 until the establishment of the Royal Chapel Congregation of 1526. A study of unpublished sources held at the General Archive of Simancas shows that the Catholic Monarchs, particularly Fernando, prioritised its construction to the detriment of developing a sound ecclesiastical organisation in the Kingdom of Granada. These documents highlight the Royal Chapel's dependence on the royal treasury, by way of juros de heredad or extraordinary payment orders (libranzas), instead of relying on the revenues generated by its own properties and rights. Finally, the paper turns to Carlos V to show how the Royal Chapel became a priority during the first years of his reign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, the reform of the religious orders and its support by the different groups of power and political agents introduced new ways of looking, seeing, understanding, and interacting in the monastic and convent environment. In this paper we will analyse the way in which religious communities, and especially female ones, subjected to a strict enclosure, interacted with the different spaces and architectural scenarios, as well as with the iconographic programs developed in them, trying to highlight the important role played by sight, or the deprivation of it, as a devotional and contemplative instrument in the observant Castilian context of the 15th and early 16th centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the evolution of the relations of benefactoría and protection between the nobility and the urban patriciate, on the one hand, and the religious orders, on the other, during the Castilian Late Middle Ages. The focus will be on the various monastic and conventual foundations carried out by these groups, as well as the donations and protection provided to religious centers. An overall analysis will be made of the different religious orders that were present in Castile during the study period: traditional -Benedictines, Cistercians and Premonstratensians-, mendicants -Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Carmelites-, redeemers of captives -Trinitarians and Mercedarians- and the orders that entered Castile in the first Trastámara reigns -Hyeronimites and Carthusians-. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse in a comparative perspective diplomatic exchanges involving the Christian realms of the Iberian peninsula, especially the crown of Aragon, during the later middle ages. In a framework of legal pluralism, two types of community—kingdoms and towns—were especially important in diplomatic practice. The diplomacies of kings, communities within kingdoms and towns interacted in complex entanglements. When kings were absent or became the enemy of communities, the diplomatic role of the latter could increase dramatically. This phenomenon is explored in two case-studies: the so-called 'great division' of the Mallorcan king's lands (1324–26) and the Catalan civil war (1462–73). Some communities appear to have had an expert knowledge of diplomatic codes, practices and languages. The execution of diplomacy could be challenging and crucial for the resilience of communities but it could also reveal the fragility of their unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a discursive-pragmatic approach to linguistic variation, the goal of this paper is to analyse the lexical variation maestro-profesor in a sample of official documents of primary state schools and privately-owned but state-funded ones in the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha (Spain). The analysis reveals that the lexical alternative profesor, significantly more common in the corpus than maestro, can be considered a case of uplifting euphemism intended to upgrade and magnify the professional status and social appreciation of teachers in infant and primary education. In this way, profesor plays an important role as a face-saving device which is part of a more general strategy of positive self-presentation for schoolteachers that may introduce some degree of ambiguity in the message conveyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the language attitudes of listeners from six different regions of Spain, Asturias, Castile and León, Castile-La Mancha, the Canary Islands, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, towards a nonsibilant variant of coda /s/, the velarized /s/. This velar pronunciation, known by some as the ejque madrileño, has previously been found to index a Madrid identity for Madrileño listeners, though the traits ascribed such a speaker are quite negative. The current paper finds that like Madrileños themselves, participants from Asturias and Castile and León also associate velarized /s/ with Madrid. Participants from Castile-La Mancha, the Canary Islands, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands do not consider the velarized variant to be Madrileño. Furthermore, differing judgments of the nonsibilant /s/ are found among the regions tested, with participants from Catalonia and the Balearic Islands showing the most negative judgments while participants from Castile-La Mancha show no negative variable effect in their judgments. It is found that all of these out-group listeners do not show as severe of judgments as those seen by in-group members (Madrilenos themselves) in previous literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the features and practices of military command during a war of conquest, as exhibited by Castilian captains at the dawn of Iberian Atlantic expansion between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Focusing on Castilian royal chronicles of military campaigns against the aboriginal people of the Canary Islands, such texts demonstrate continuities with the military discourse developed during the war against the Muslims in medieval Spain, as well as adaptation to a new geographical, social and cultural context, embodied in the experiences of the conquest of the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the use of a documentary source from the 18th century, the Ensenada Cadastre, as a tool of geohistorical study. This documentary source provides a way of furthering knowledge about the economy of each town in the crown of Castile. The town of Cubillas de Santa Marta, in the province of Valladolid, has been used as an example here. Thanks to this analysis of the cadastral documentation, it has been possible to analyse the agricultural activity and the distribution of crops, to determine the resulting landscape, and thus to be able to compare that with its current state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to make a sociological study of the Castilian episcopacy in the reign of Enrique IV (1454-1474). We will analyse differents sociological aspects of the bishops, such as their number, appointment age, social and regional origins, education or their pre-episcopal careers. The ultimate goal is to move towards a better knowledge of the bishops as an ecclesiastical and power elite in late medieval Castile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of the confusion and uncertainty that COVID-19 has caused over the last year, Geography has proven to be a useful aid in the interpretation of the spatial dynamics that explain the transmission of the virus. Applied cartography and GIS analysis of epidemiological data have been consolidated as essential tools for interpreting the health crisis. This paper explores the usefulness of maps for the study of the evolution of the pandemic in Castile and Leon, one of the Spanish regions with the highest levels of infection and mortality. Based on the statistical variables of sick and dead people at the scale of the Basic Health Area (BHA), a first analytical approach is carried out by means of a sequence of dynamic maps during the first wave. Afterwards, a systematic study is carried out using thematic mapping for the period of the three waves, a period between March 2020 and March 2021. The analysis unravels the differential impact of the disease between rural and urban areas and reveals the problems of the mismatch between the functional divisions of the territory (BHA, as units of health analysis) and the scale of administrative management (municipalities, as the effective scale of action). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population decline and ageing do not only affect rural areas. The aim of this paper is to analyze the demographic trends of the 50 Spanish capital cities from 2002 to 2019. We create clusters of growing, stable and declining cities according to the economic growth period 2014-2019. We then analyze the contribution of natural growth and different types of migration to the growth rate. Finally, we measure the population change by age over time. For this research, a demographic analysis approach has been applied using register microdata from the Spanish Statistical Office-Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE). Our results show a new trend of population decline in 15 Spanish capital cities, 7 of them in the periphery region of Castile and León. While suburbanization was the most important factor of population shrinkage before the 2008 economic crisis, out-migration of young populations to the global Spanish cities and negative natural growth are currently the main components of demographic decline. These shrinking cities have also been receiving fewer migrants from abroad and rural areas, while observing an increase in their ageing population and a decrease in their female population between the ages 15 and 49. Meanwhile, the number of inhabitants in the 11 major capital cities has been rising due to the increase in international immigration since 2014, as it was before 2008, and to a lesser extent by internal migration from other Spanish cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Habsburg sale of jurisdictions in Castile allowed a vast number of wealthy men to climb the Early Modern social pyramid by obtaining titles akin to those of feudal lords. This paper analyses the case of Antonio Álvarez de Bohorques, 1st Marquis of Los Trujillos, who tried to build a manorial state by buying up estates between the Kingdoms of Granada and Jaén. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dead wood is a microcosm of biological diversity. Saproxylic insect diversity at the global level is immense, with estimates that up to one third of forest dwelling species rely on moribund or dead wood at some point in their life cycle. Most studies on saproxylic insects have focused on taxa such as beetles, or on areas like the northern temperate regions. This paper presents the first assessment of the diversity of tropical saproxylic Diptera, from the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica. Forty-one trees representing nine species and six plant families were sampled in a rearing experiment designed to study saproxylic beetles. In total, 272 individuals attributable to 18 families of Diptera were reared as bycatch. Low abundance and species richness of flies was observed overall. A majority of taxa were in saprophagous and mycophagous larval feeding guilds, followed by predators. Host associations, successional stage, and stratum preferences are estimated for the more abundant species. The results support previous findings regarding saproxylic Diptera and their association with moist wood and secondary forests. Interesting trends and noteworthy reared taxa are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality control of flour is essential to control the quality of bread produced from it. We propose a control method based on the morphological characteristics of the granules of starch. The automation of the identification, segmentation and determination of the average size of the granules of starch of each of the cereals that make up a flour, from microscopy images, is an essential procedure for producers who want to produce bread under the protected geographical indication (PGI) 'Galician Bread'. This identification and counting procedure, if performed manually, is a tedious activity for a trained expert, and is very time consuming. Thus, automating this task would streamline the process, in addition to saving a great deal of time. This paper addresses this problem by using deep learning approaches (Mask R–CNN) to predict the type of the granule of starch and its size for the first time. The trained models are then evaluated with the same raw microscopy images of these granules observed under polarized light, as has been previouly used for manual identification and counting. A dataset comprising 1308 2564 × 1924-pixel images is analysed. The images contain 17000 labelled granules of starch for two types of wheat: commercial wheat flour from 'Castilla' (type 0) and the Galician autochthonous flour 'Caaveiro' (type 1). The number of samples is approximately the same for each class. Instance segmentation with Mask R–CNN (Model II) achieved valid results for unseen images, with a categorical global accuracy of about 88.6% and with a discrepancy with respect to the areas of the granules as estimated by a human expert of less than 4%. The performance achieved by Mask R–CNN produces a strong correlation between the results of an expert and the results of the network, confirming the practical validity of our proposal. • Deep learning techniques were applied to microscopy images of wheat flour samples. • Mask R–CNN can be used to automate the identification of wheat flours (global accuracy ≈ 88.6%). • Mask R–CNN can also be used to estimate the area of the starch grains in wheat flours. • The Mask R–CNN model is a reliable, fast and low-cost method for checking flour mixtures. • The Mask R–CNN model is useful for performing quality control for the PGI 'Galician Bread'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the Castilian lanza, making a proposal on its origin, and reveals our stance on an underlying issue regarding this topic: it has been discussed by many Historians from different perspectives that, far from removing all doubt, have generated some confusion. One of these is the time frame. While the available data allow to determine a specific point in time for the emergence of the lanza in Castile, some authors have formulated different hypotheses as a result of either tracking semantic records in all kinds of texts -mainly literary-or following evidence in a military-organizational context. Another research line, also military-related, has been focused on finding equivalents in other late medieval European territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the engagement of the bishops of the Kingdom of Castile with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and the ways in which they encountered the events and legislation of the Council. It offers a new synthesis of the available data and considers the ways in which the Castilian experience of the Fourth Lateran Council can be measured against its contemporaries. By examining its discourse in contrast to local lived realities, scholarly study can better understand the ways in which conciliar acta were a point of discourse for local clerics, rather than a normative standard against which their actions would be judged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a long time historiography has stood up for Late Medieval Castilian tactical backwardness with the insufficient research into Castilian military tactics contributing to the persistence of old paradigms. The aim of this paper is to refuse that vision by focusing on battle tactics showing the importance of mounted combat in fifteenth-century Castile. I will analyse the battlefield function of both heavy and light cavalries, also examining the supporting role of the infantry. This Castilian preference for mounted combat could be due to not only military reasons, but also social ones. In Castile, as in almost every corner of Medieval Western Europe, nobility's political and social leadership had its reflection on warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to study the features of the military command that was exerted by the kings of Castile in Late Middle Ages with respect to its performance during the campaigns against the Muslims, particularly from the reign of king Alfonso XI to the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Kings. These military traits were strongly associated to the notions of 'the recovery of Spain' (restauratio Hispaniae, 'Reconquista'), Crusade and Chivalry. From its analysis through 14th-15th centuries chronistical texts, we propose the hypothesis that this medieval model of monarchical military leadership, linked to the aforementioned ideological framework, could have been reflected in the narrative of the 'Crónicas de Indias' and concurrently have been assumed by the Spanish captains of the Conquest of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to make a review from a diplomacy perspective of the municipal ordinances, which are some of the most important documents among those belonging to the medieval chancellery, despite there is little knowledge about them as studies have been few. The analysis has been limited to the oldest municipal norms of Guadalajara, due to their antiquity, the way they were managed by the crown and due to their interesting content about urban supply. The main contribution consisted in their documentary exploration. Likewise, perspectives for future diplomatic reasonings through comparative research have been specified. Our proposal will therefore allow a deeper knowledge about the installation and evolution of the municipal ordinances in the 14th and 15th centuries in the kingdom of Castile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the policies that the Castile of the seventeenth century followed toward creating and selling short-term and long-term debt paid off from the Crown's New World revenues. We use microdata to reconstruct comprehensive fiscal accounts for Spanish America during the seventeenth century. Our new time series evidence shows that the Spanish Empire maintained differential debt policies in the center and the periphery. Spanish America issued considerably less debt, more credible than coetaneous Castilian debt. However, the issuances' size did not reflect lower debt capacity in the New World, as the Spanish Empire restrained long-term debt issuance to emergencies. We also provide complementary evidence from debt issuances and explain why differential debt policies were maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Muslim oaths found in Christian legal texts in late medieval and early modern Iberia, especially in the Crown of Aragon. Whereas lawmakers in Castile used Castilian to record Muslim oaths, in the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia these formulas appeared in Arabic, though written in Latin characters. This paper traces the evolution of these Arabic formulas during four centuries, from the abbreviated forms of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as "baylle ylloe," to the more elaborate forms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which include references to the qibla (the direc-tion of prayer), the Qur'än, and Ramadan. Comparing these formulas with those found in Muslim legal compilations produced in Christian Iberia shows that despite different emphases (on location, timing, and manner of oath taking), both Christian and Muslim legal texts recognized and established that Muslims swear by God. Although attitudes towards Muslims grew increasingly hostile in the latter Middle Ages, this analysis of Muslim oaths shows that Arabic continued to mediate the legal interaction between the two communities and that Islamic rituals, as mentioned in the oaths, were still very much a part of the multicultural landscape of late medieval and early modern Iberia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the War of the Castilian Succession (1475–1479), the Kingdom of Castile underwent major economic and commercial growth. The foreign policy of the Catholic Monarchs focused on strengthening political and trade links with other neighbouring powers such as England, Portugal and Flanders, and this was used by merchants to build up their wealth. However, the historian researching these merchants will discover that they suffered multiple attacks while undertaking their trade in supposedly friendly waters. This study will focus on assessing these attacks, learning what consequences they had for their victims and finding out how they could have been resolved. With this in mind, this paper shall take the example of seafarers from a region in Northern Castile known as Cuatro Villas de la Costa (Four Towns of the Coast) and discuss their experiences (sometimes as aggressors and sometimes as victims) to find out the mechanisms employed in Castile to solve conflicts generated at sea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this paper is to introduce the results of a research work about the psychosocial references within the family context, made with nine adolescent mothers between 16 and 20 years of age. The research was performed in the Aranjuez and Castilla sectors, in Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia, where the Fundación Carla Cristina's UPAs (Pedagogical Support Units, for the acronym in Spanish) work. This qualitative research work was oriented to the phenomenological-hermeneutical method and aims to understand the meaning of the motherhood experience in the exercise of breeding children among the adolescents and to establish the generational continuity/discontinuity between mothers and daughters. Semi-structured interviews a reflection workshop and dialogs with the grandmothers were performed in order to analyze the links between mothers and children, the structure of the rules, the way affection is exercised and the influence of the family support networks on the role of the mothers and on the breeding ways. Among the findings, the way adolescent mothers re-take conceptions from their mothers and the forms in which they exercise motherhood are remarked, and also is the way they give new meanings and modify the link and the interaction ways with their children under affection terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is to present the most important historic reasons for which Spanish, since the mid-thirteenth century, became an official language of the Kingdom of Castile and Leon, beating the half century France and England. The effect of the imposition of castellano drecho, a term used by the King Alfonso X is normativization and homogenization of the Old Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the conflicts and alliances between different Dukes of Pastrana, lords of a Grandee household, and their relatives are analysed from two viewpoints. The first perspective shows how litigation between early-modern aristocratic siblings for family inheritance was a very common phenomenon. Secondly, litigious kin were allies in the political and social arena. With these features in mind, this paper provides an explanation of aristocratic behaviour as the consequence of the composite nature of aristocratic identity and the two juridical bodies used by the elites. According to this juridical theory, sovereigns were juridically composed of two bodies. The first one was political, representing eternal royalty. The second one was natural, meaning the physical person of each king. As will be stated in the article, this royal conception of the two bodies was adopted by the nobility and played an important role in aristocratic family conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the uses of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the universities of Castilla and León. We believe that the integration of ICT in the universities is essential for the development of a university system in line with the requirements of the knowledge society. This piece of work must be placed within a research that has analyzed the use of ICT in higher education in the universities of Castilla and León. In our view, the uses of ICT in higher education are one of the main key indicators for its level of integration. With this research, whose goals relate to ascertaining the level of integration of ICT in the universities of Castilla and León, we seek to identify the factors that influence the use-avoidance of ICT by professors, and to describe the uses that they make of ICT in the development of their profession (teaching and research). For this reason, we have conducted an ex-post-facto research with a descriptive and improvement-seeking motivation. Even though the results of this research highlight the widespread use of ICT within universities, they also point out that this use is superficial and indicate a lack of actual integration of ICT in the universities of Castilla and León. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural innovation programs have been a real shock for certain European regions, because they have represented a huge investment that's needed for proper management to direct some structural funds. In this sense, this paper analyzes the investment of these programs in developing measures to support rural tourism sector, which marked a significant increase in supply at various levels: increasing rural accommodation, the number of beds available for tourists, rehabilitation of heritage, value and recovery of historical elements and the historical, cultural, architectural and natural countryside. The empirical analysis of this study is developed for the region of Castilla-La Mancha, using the latest information available investment under the Shift-share methodology, which identifies the different effects (global, structural and competitive) that these programmes have on these initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper analyses population reproduction in two different regions of Spain, Castile-Leon and Madrid, during the twentieth century. Over this period, although the two regions experienced a similar demographic transition in terms of both mortality and fertility, the population of Madrid grew eight-fold (from 0.7 to 6 million) while that of Castile-Leon increased by less than 10% (from 2.3 to 2.5 million). This difference is due mainly to the effect of migration. In order to analyse this process, we used the birth replacement ratio index. This indicator provides two advantages with respect to other methods: first, it is a retrospective indicator that does not assume hypothetical scenarios about the impact of migration on population dynamics; second, it enables us to distinguish the effect of each component, specifically the impact of migration in the generational replacement process. We found that in contexts of very low fertility and very high survival rates, this migration component is the main determinant of the replacement process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimum Renyi's pseudodistance estimators (MRPEs) enjoy good robustness properties without a significant loss of efficiency in general statistical models, and, in particular, for linear regression models (LRMs). In this line, Castilla et al. considered robust Wald-type test statistics in LRMs based on these MRPEs. In this paper, we extend the theory of MRPEs to Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) using independent and nonidentically distributed observations (INIDO). We derive asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators and analyze their influence function to asses their robustness properties. Additionally, we define robust Wald-type test statistics for testing linear hypothesis and theoretically study their asymptotic distribution, as well as their influence function. The performance of the proposed MRPEs and Wald-type test statistics are empirically examined for the Poisson Regression models through a simulation study, focusing on their robustness properties. We finally test the proposed methods in a real dataset related to the treatment of epilepsy, illustrating the superior performance of the robust MRPEs as well as Wald-type tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, the environment is very changeable, so firms have to base their competitive advantages on intangible resources, and one of them human resources. As a result of this, training is receiving special attention on the part of the firms and, nowadays, many firms attach great importance to this practice within human resources management. The training must be planned to address the lack of skills of employees and the training plan must answer "who, when, where and how". In the present paper, we will analyze, in a qualitative and quantitative way, how the above mentioned training process is developed within the firms. With this purpose in mind we have used a data base of 572 companies from Castilla-La Mancha with at least 50 employees, from which we obtained 118 valid questionnaires (20,6%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the origin and evolution of three health archives at the Hospital de León that forms part of the Public Health Service of the region of Castilla and León (Spain). The principle of provenance is essential to decide upon the organisation of medical histories archives and all the documents included in them. The study assesses the management of the above mentioned health archives in order to highlight the importance of appropriate cataloguing, shelving and storage of medical records for an efficient day–to–day running of hospitals. The results will be useful in estimating the approximate cost of a proper archives management when taking into account factors such as patients staying longer than expected in hospital or the need to repeat medical tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes two imperial policies, the dynastic strategy of Charles V and the nationalist agenda of the Castilian clerical elite. The Protestant Reformation forced Charles to assess his priorities according to his conviction of religious unity and his dynastic claim of universal monarchy. Charles' ambitions compromised Spain's entrepreneurial agenda, which consisted of the defense of the Mediterranean against the Ottomans. Seeking to protect the coalescing transatlantic system and established commercial networks of Spanish businessmen, the Spanish administration under President Tavera (1524-1539) failed to convince Charles to focus on the Muslim enemy and to allow the German people to decide their own religious destinies. Instead, Charles sought to contain his universal monarchy in Europe, and his decision to restore religious unity in the empire resulted in the overextension of Spanish resources and the eventual decline of Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper was to describe dairy sheep husbandry systems in the regions of Castilla and León (Spain), bearing in mind the relative importance of this production within the world, European and Spanish contexts. The social and economic aspects where the activity takes place are described, as well as the productive and economic aspects of the current husbandry systems, with a special focus on the comparison of systems with a larger or lesser degree of intensification. Finally, an analysis is included of the changes that have taken place in the dairy sheep production systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel tool for Spanish commercial wine discrimination according to their designation of origin (PDO). A total of 65 commercial wines from different Spanish designation of origin (Alicante, Bullas, Campo de Borja, Jumilla, Castilla la Mancha, Ribeiro, Ribera de Duero, Rioja, Rueda, Utiel-Requena, Valdepeñas and Valencia) were characterized. The rare earth elements (REEs) content was determined by a high-temperature torch integrated sample introduction system (hTISIS) coupled to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The REE content was used to draw characteristic PDOs radar charts. Results indicated that the REEs fingerprint provides a good prospect to discriminate the different Spanish PDOs, except for Alicante, Castilla la Mancha, Jumilla, Utiel-Requena and Valdepeñas. Finally, for those PDOs that were not properly distinguished, a second fingerprint obtained from Ba, Co, Cr, Mn, Ni, Pb and V content was used for discrimination purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]