Leica Powers National Spanish Orthophoto Project

The project’s goal is to create half-metre orthophotos covering the entire country—more than half a million square kilometers—and update the data every two years. Next year, resolution for this project will increase to 25 centimetres for the whole territory and 10 centimetres for urban areas.

Venturo, one of the country’s largest private mapping companies with 125 employees, is responsible for creating orthophotos of four of 17 PNOA regions. Their portion covers some 60,000 square kilometres, captured at 50-centimetre resolution (50,000 square kilometres) and 25-centimetre resolution (10,000 square kilometres).

Brothers Manuel and Jose Antonio Coronado, successful Leica Geosystems distributors in the south and west of Spain and in Portugal, started Venturo about two years ago. The company is based in Asturias--an area known for its coal mining industry. With the mines now closed, the region looks to high-tech employers like Venturo for future growth and prosperity.

The firm’s 2,000-square-meter office is stocked to support such growth with 12 Leica Photogrammetry Suite (LPS) digital photogrammetric workstations, 40 Digi3D (a local feature extraction SW) stereoplotting workstations, a Leica DSW700 photogrammetric scanner, five Leica IMAGINEÒ Professional remote sensing licenses, 24 SIGRAF cadastre licenses, and an EMC2 Clarion 35TB massive storage disk library.

Venturo currently offers orthophoto, stereoplotting, mapmaking and cadastre services. The company hopes to extend into other areas with the acquisition of aerial sensors and airborne LIDAR. “We want to expand into geographic information systems, urban and regional planning, and related areas,” Llorens said.