F72 ANDALUCIA
by Luis Crespo

1/700 Spanish Armada Frigate F72 Andalucia (AFV Club)

The real thing:

The "Andalucía", named after Andalusia, Spain's largest and most populous region that covers most of Southern Spain, is the second ship of the "Baleares" class of five vessels, all of them named after spanish regions ("Baleares", "Andalucía", "Cataluña", "Asturias" and "Extremadura"). The "Andalucía" and her sisters, wich are the oldest surface combattants in Spanish Armada, were built as the result of an unexpected turn in Britain´s foreign policy.

From 1900 to the Spanish Civil War, the spanish Armada had followed the wake of the Royal Navy, building british designed vessels. Our Civil War and then WWII meant a full stop in spanish building programmes, and the defeat of the Axis killed all german and italian-based "dreams of glory" for the Armada.

By the late fifties, when international isolation of General Franco´s regime started to relax, the first modern vessels acquired by the Spanish navy were five Fletcher class destroyers. They meant a fresh breath for the fleet, but were anyway obsolete.

Then, in the mid-sixties, the Armada again started to think of home-built warships, and it naturally turned to Great Britain. The idea was to locally build "Leander" class frigates, and negotiations went on until a new laborist government vetoed the tecnology transfer to "fascist" Franco´s navy, so the Armada had to turn to the United States. The American administration, aplying the cold war aforism that Franco could be a son of a *****, but after all he was THEIR son of a *****, had no problem to offer their Knox design.

But the Knox did not fulfil all spanish requirements. The Armada needed a multirole surface combattant, while the American frigates were primarily ASW ships, so they were thoroughly redesigned, loosing the helicopter in the process, and becoming the spanish "Baleares" class. The most significative diffence between the Knox and the Baleares classes, short from the lack of helicopter facilities of the latter, is the Mk 22 missile launcher and its SM-1-MR AAW missiles, and, of course, the SPS-52 3D radar, that make the "Baleares" class frigates true multirole combattants.

The "Andalucía" was laid down in 1971 and commisioned in 1974. She has served well for thirty years and will be retired in 2005.

Her statistics are:

The model:

There is no commercial kit for these ships (have I said this before?), but luckily enough there is a very nice 1/700 kit of the Knox class: FF-1073 Robert E. Peary from AFV Club. I, much like Ayala Botto did for his pretty Extremadura, used that kit to build my Andalucía. It needed major surgery, but I think the procedure was succesful (well, at least the "patient" did not pass away in the OR!) I used polystyrene sheet to build some decks here and there, generic Aber railing, and 6-0 silk for rigging. Mk 22 launcher and Harpoons are from Revell weapons sprues, and Meroka CIWS are built from scratch. I include a couple of pictures of SPS Andalucía alongside SPS Cazadora.