José Joaquín Romero de Landa (1735–1807)

Abstract

José Joaquín Romero de Landa was a military man, sailor and Naval Engineer of the Spanish Royal Navy. His military life was in the service of the Crown, and he is known today for his professional career as one of the first Spanish naval engineers. He was a naval officer and officer of the Spanish army, and was the first official naval engineer and ship designer of the Spanish Navy. He began to develop this facet at the Guarnizo Shipyard, where he was assigned in November 1765. For four years he devoted himself to the study of shipbuilding. In 1767 he took on his first responsibility with the drawing up of two plans for an 80-gun ship and a 20-gun frigate. In 1769, when he opted to become a construction engineer, he became one of the few officers of the War Officers Corps to join the newly created Corps of Engineers. This article will study, on the one hand, the key formative factors that made José Joaquín Romero de Landa an enlightened engineer and, on the other, how his work was integrated into the shipbuilding systems developed in the eighteenth century.