Hold down any key and you’ll get the special characters mapped to it. For example, if you’re writing “señor,” simply press and hold the “n” key longer than normal and you’ll get a popup menu with choices. An example of OS X taking a page out of the iOS usability guide.
There are a lot more characters then just the accents. Why doesn’t mac make it easy to find the character map to access these other figures?
System Preferences –> Keyboard, choose “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar”.