In this article we pay tribute to OR Spanish pioneers, both theoreticians and practitioners, and we make a resemblance of the origins of the Spanish Statistics and Operations Research Society (the Spanish acronym is SEIO). We present some highlights of SEIO in relation to OR, as the journal TOP, the research prize Ramiro Melendreras, and we enumerate the main lines of current research in Spain. Finally, we provide some tables showing the impressive evolution in number of published papers in prestigious journals by Spanish researchers, individually and classified according to the 2010 AMS Subject Classification.