During the reign of Philp II (1556-1595) about a half century arter the begin-ning of compilation of hydrographical data as “Padrón Real”, the Spanish court under direction of Ovand, the Visitador del Consejo de Indias, had promoted the systematic compilation of related data basic to formulation of Crown policy. The Relaciones Geográficas de Indias, 1577-1585, are the most remarkable and systematic corpus among the several responses to the royal orders requiring reports on general and particular aspects of Spanish ultramarine realm.
The questionnaire which contained 50 items on American lands, people, resources, products traditions etc., was circulated among the colonial officials and their replies were sent back to Spain during 1578-1585. This stipulated procedure which had been developed by Ovand and Velasco, the first royal Cosmógrafo-Cronista, required pinturas (maps) of the area as well as the detailed textual reports. Hence, in addition to a documentary corpus (208 documents, of which 167 were from the New Spain), there is a lesser but significant cartographic body of material. There remain 76 extant maps of RG from the New Spain.
For the purpose of evaluating the significance of RG and their maps, it would be necessary to propose the classification of RG maps from two distinct aspects.
First, considering the extent or scale of covered area in a map, we classify 76 maps into four types as follows.
Type a) plan of the principal town showing the gridiron pattern of streets.
Type b) a combination of somewhat detailed town plan with less detailed map of surounding area.
Type c) map of the jurisdiction. There are three subtypes corresponding to the levels of jurisdiction unit: c-i) a principal town type, c-ii) composite type, contained several principal towns, c-iii) “provincia” type.
Type d) so called marinar's chart.
Our second classification is based on the spectrum of dichotomy of graphic style, that is, european vs. native. The maps belonged to type a) and d) would fall in the former category. We follow the classification proposed by Donald Robertson. He classified 76 RG maps into three categories; european type, native colonial type and mixed colonial type. The epithet “colonial” suggests that we have no prehispanic survivals in RG maps.
Maps in european type (35 examples) consist of two distinct mode of cartographic depiction. One is the landscape map type painted in the three dimensional perspective, the other is the cartographic map type. The latter type is described with conceptual signs in the two dimensional perspective, and antecedent of our modern topographical maps. Several maps which lack these two refined graphic styles and were described with less skilled hand are included in another type, namely, folk type.
As the ideal type of native map in the prehispanic period, I dare to assume a map called “Cuauhxochamatl” (chart of boundary) in the native language. In the format of this hypothetical native map, a pictographic place sign for a principal town of the area is encircled with the chain of pictographic place signs indicating boundary standmarks and the space between them is left empty. We could find out some influences of european graphic style in three RG maps classified as native colonial. But they preserve the format of native map, therefore, with a few hesitations, we classify them as native “colonial”.
The third type, mixed colonial type (38 examples) has two subtypes. One is the acculturated type which would be transfigured with dominant influence of european graphic style in the copying process of the survivals of prehispanic maps.

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