As Ponce de León (2005, 675-6) explains, prior to the publication in the nineteenth century of materials specifically orientated to the study of Spanish, this language already plays an important role in Portuguese and Latin-Portuguese gramaticography, orthography and lexicography. Although the impact of its presence has already received some specific attention from historiographical research –as, in the last years, illustrate the works of Rodríguez (2005), Ponce de León (2006b), Salas Quesada (2006) and Duarte (in print)–, several texts are yet to be explored. One of the works that still deserves further investigation is precisely João Franco Barreto’s, though it has already received some important comments from this point of view on the works of Gonçalves (2003, 872-3) and Ponce de Léon (2006a and 2006b). This paper engages on the listing and interpretation of the explicit references to the Spanish language in Barreto’s Ortografia, trying to analyse them while focusing primarily on the goals that they serve there and its underlying representations. On doing so, the paper attempts to demonstrate that Barreto’s work contains precious information on the Spanish language and that it does not share the conflictive point of view that prevailed in the previous tradition, and that, although with other features, kept determining the presence of Spanish in the Portuguese tradition in the following centuries.