Iberia is 75 years old

Spanish airline Iberia turned 75 last Saturday with a yearlong celebration that featured a temporary photo exhibit on the company’s history shown in twelve Spanish airports –it’s right now showing in Southern Tenerife. Celebration also included the issuing of mail stamps depicting the company’s very first plane and one of its latest aircraft.

Iberia got its big break on the Madrid-Barcelona route flown with three Rohrbach Roland planes seating ten passengers each. That opening ceremony occurred 75 years ago was presided over by King Alfonso XIII at the Carabanchel Air Field in Madrid.

Indeed, the company had been founded six months earlier in Madrid on June 28, 1927. At the time, the carrier’s booster and majority owner was Horacio Echevarrieta, a businessman from Guecho, while Germany-based Lufthansa used to hold 24 percent of all shares.

The company’s assets were fixed then at 1.1 million pesetas. Seventy-five years later, over 507 passengers have flown aboard Iberia’s 552 different aircraft that have made up its fleet. Those planes, for their part, have clicked 4 billion kilometers, the equivalent of 5,200 round-trip shuttles between the Earth and the Moon.