University of Vigo

Following the introduction of the new Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the arrival of democracy, the newly elected president of Spain, Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s 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.[4]

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.

Galicia's first university, the University of Santiago de Compostela, was created in 1495. This was the only university in Galicia had no other university 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.

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.