Norwegian adds another historical Spanish face to a Boeing 737 – the sixth in the series

Rosalía de Castro was an acclaimed mid-19^th century novelist and poet, born in the Galicia cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela, where she died in 1885 aged 48 from uterine cancer.

Described as precursor of modern Spanish poetry and existentialism and a pioneer in feminist thinking, Rosalía told her children on her death-bed to burn all her unpublished manuscripts after she had passed away.

Fortunately, enough were published in her short lifetime to make her a household name, including her poetry collections Cantares gallegos ('Songs of Galicia'), Follas Novas ('New leaves'), En las orillas del Sar ('On the shores of the river Sar') and her novels La hija del mar ('Daughter of the sea'), Flavio and El caballero de las botas azules ('The gentleman in the blue boots').

Her most active period was from the late 1850s to 1881, and she wrote both in Castilian Spanish and in the Galician language, gallego – or galego as it is referred to in its native tongue.

Artists are working on the author's portrait on the side of a 186-seater Boeing 737-800 at the company's hangar in Oslo to mark the 180^th anniversary of her birth, and it is expected to be finished by the end of this month.

But the company took the above photograph of the work in progress to share with the media.

Norwegian's marketing manager in Spain, Miguel Urresti, says De Castro was a ground-breaking writer in two ways: by reviving gallego as a language of artistic expression, and by her key role in the emancipation of women in what was then a very patriarchal society.

As well as 17th-century epic novelist Miguel de Cervantes and the pioneer Christopher Columbus – or Cristóbal Colón, as he was in fact called – who discovered the Americas in 1492, Rosalía joins a 'family' which includes three more key figures in Spain's history.

Juan Sebastián Elcano sailed around the world for the first time in 1519, discovering the nautical route to the Pacific Ocean from Europe via the far south of Latin America; suffragette, politician and feminist activist Clara Campoamor - who was forced into exile in Switzerland by the Civil War where she died aged 84 in 1972, and who was behind votes for women being introduced in Spain in 1933; and the most recent, the prolific children's and adults' novelist, playwright and poet and popular kids' TV show host Gloria Fuertes, who died from lung cancer in Madrid aged 81 in 1998.