semi-abstract representations of Bartolomeo de Pareto, Benincasa and others: Bianco, for instance, shifts its orientation to northwest–southeast, transmutes generic bays into river mouths (including a large one on the northeastern coast), and elongates a southern tail into a cape with a small cluster of islets offshore. Around the time of Spain's discovery of South America, Antillia dwindles substantially in size on Behaim's globe and later charts. Contrary to the earlier descriptions of the two island groups as distinct entities, a 16th-century notion relegates Antillia to the island of São Miguel, the largest of the Azores, where a national park centering on two lakes still bears the name Sete Cidades National Park. Medieval beliefs and the Age of Discovery A Portuguese legend tells how the island was settled in the early 8th century in the face of the Moorish conquest of Iberia by the Archbishop of Porto, six other bishops and their parishioners to avoid the ensuing Moorish invasion. Each congregation founded a city, namely, Aira, Anhuib, Ansalli, Ansesseli, Ansodi, Ansolli and Con, and once established, burnt their caravel ships as a symbol of their autonomy. The reporting of this settlement comes courtesy of a young couple who eloped back to Europe on a rare trading ship and reported the seven cities as a model of agricultural, economic and cultural harmony. Centuries later, the island became known as a proto-utopian commonwealth, free from the disorders of less favoured states. Since these events predated the Kingdom of Portugal and the clergy's heritage marked a claim to significant strategical gains, Spain counterclaimed that the expedition was, in fact, theirs. One of the chief early descriptions of the heritage of Antillia is inscribed on the globe which the geographer Martin Behaim made at Nuremberg in 1492. Behaim relates the Catholic escape from the barbarians, though his date of 734 is probably a mistake for 714. The inscription adds that a Spanish vessel sighted the island in 1414, while a Portuguese crew claimed to have landed on Antillia in the 1430s. In a later version of the legend, the bishops fled from Mérida, Spain, when Moors attacked it around the year 1150. With this legend underpinning the growing reports of a bountiful civilisation midway between Europe and Cipangu, or Japan, the quest to discover the Seven Cities attracted significant attention. However, by the last decade of the 15th century, the Portuguese state's official sponsorship of