Political background Following the introduction of the new
Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the arrival of
democracy, the newly elected Prime Minister of
Spain,
Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, leader of the
Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), introduced legislation from
Madrid to transform the hitherto centralized Spanish State into an amalgamation of
autonomous regions with different degrees of self-administration. The northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula was thus raised to the status of autonomous region, and the Spanish language had thereafter to co-exist with the new official language: Galician. A new parliament and a new government were created in Galicia for its people. And from the Galician capital, Santiago de Compostela, the newly created
Galician Parliament would bring new legislation for the autonomous community. And it was in this set of circumstances that the university map in Galicia was transformed.
From one university to many Galicia's first university, the
University of Santiago de Compostela, was created in 1495. This was the only university in Galicia until the early 1980s, when two satellite campuses of the
University of Santiago de Compostela were created in
A Coruña and
Vigo. Before that, the only other institution in Galicia with the power to grant degrees was the
School of Naval and Industrial Engineers of
Ferrol, which was created by a ministerial order under the initiative of General
Francisco Franco in the early 1960s. This school was directly dependent on the Ministry of Education in
Madrid, although in 1992 it was amalgamated with the University of A Coruña. In the late 1980s, the two university campuses of
A Coruña and
Vigo, which were created as dependent on the
University of Santiago de Compostela, became fully independent universities, being able for the first time to issue their own official university degree titles.
From the 1990s to the present As of the early 1990s, Galicia had three universities, each of them with its own satellite campuses. These were the
University of Santiago de Compostela with two university campuses, one in
Santiago de Compostela and the other in
Lugo; the
University of A Coruña with two university campuses, one in
A Coruña and the other in
Ferrol; and the University of Vigo with three university campuses, one in
Pontevedra, one in
Ourense, and one in
Vigo. ==Campus of Vigo ==