If you want to preserve characters like ñ, ó, ç, etc. when migrating a MySQL database use mysqldump to export the database with this options:
mysqldump -u root -p --default-character-set latin1 --skip-character-set <dbname> > mydump.mysql
create the target database with:
mysqladmin -u root -p create <dbname> --default-character-set latin1 --collate latin1_swedish_ci
then restore:
mysql -u root -p --default-character-set latin1 <dbname> < mydump.mysql




