Gonzalo Anes y Álvarez de Castrillón (1931–2014), director of the Real Academia de la Historia from 1988 until his death, was professor of Economics at the University of Santiago de Compostela and at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. He gained a doctorate in Economic and Political Science for a thesis published under the title Problemas de la agricultura española en el tránsito del Antiguo al Nuevo Régimen (1970), which won him the Taurus award and marked a before and after in Spanish historiography. He was editor-in-chief of the Moneda y Crédito journal and wrote important books such as Economía e ‘Ilustración’ en la España del siglo XVIII (1969) and a volume on El Antiguo Régimen: los Borbones (1975) for Alfaguara’s Historia de España, which was later republished as El Siglo de las Luces (1994). At the Real Academia de la Historia he was a driving force behind the monumental Diccionario biográfico español. He won the Taurus award in 1966, the National History Prize in 1995, the Francis Valdés national prize for journalism and the Rey Juan Carlos I economics prize in 2006.