Spain

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Spain

Alternative Title: España, Kingdom of Spain, Reino de España

Table of Contents

Introduction

Land

People

Economy

Government and society

Cultural life

History

Kings and queens regnant of Spain

Spain, country located in extreme southwestern Europe. It occupies about 85 percent of the Iberian Peninsula, which it shares with its smaller neighbour Portugal.

SpainSpain.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

SpainEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

A village in Andalusia, Spain, showing housing typical of the region.© David Warren/SuperStockSpain is a storied country of stone castles, snowcapped mountains, vast monuments, and sophisticated cities, all of which have made it a favoured travel destination. The country is geographically and culturally diverse. Its heartland is the Meseta, a broad central plateau half a mile above sea level. Much of the region is traditionally given over to cattle ranching and grain production; it was in this rural setting that Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote tilted at the tall windmills that still dot the landscape in several places. In the country’s northeast are the broad valley of the Ebro River, the mountainous region of Catalonia, and the hilly coastal plain of Valencia. To the northwest is the Cantabrian Mountains, a rugged range in which heavily forested, rain-swept valleys are interspersed with tall peaks. To the south is the citrus-orchard-rich and irrigated lands of the valley of the Guadalquivir River, celebrated in the renowned lyrics of Spanish poets Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado; over this valley rises the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. The southern portion of the country is desert, an extension of the Sahara made familiar to Americans through the “spaghetti western” films of the 1960s and early ’70s. Lined with palm trees, rosemary bushes, and other tropical vegetation, the southeastern Mediterranean coast and the Balearic Islands enjoy a gentle climate, drawing millions of visitors and retirees, especially from northern Europe.

Alcazar (fortress) of Toledo, Spain.© Getty Images

The Puerta de Alcalá, Madrid.© Digital Vision/Getty Images

Barcelona: Torre AgbarTorre Agbar skyscraper at night in Barcelona.Geoff Tompkinson/GTImage.com (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Spain’s countryside is quaint, speckled with castles, aqueducts, and ancient ruins, but its cities are resoundingly modern. The Andalusian capital of Sevilla (Seville) is famed for its musical culture and traditional folkways; the Catalonian capital of Barcelona for its secular architecture and maritime industry; and the national capital of Madrid for its winding streets, its museums and bookstores, and its around-the-clock lifestyle. Madrid is Spain’s largest city and is also its financial and cultural centre, as it has been for hundreds of years.

The many and varied cultures that have gone into the making of Spain—those of the Castilians, Catalonians, Lusitanians, Galicians, Basques, Romans, Arabs, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies), among other peoples—are renowned for their varied cuisines, customs, and prolific contributions to the world’s artistic heritage. The country’s Roman conquerors left their language, roads, and monuments, while many of the Roman Empire’s greatest rulers were Spanish, among them Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. The Moors, who ruled over portions of Spain for nearly 800 years, left a legacy of fine architecture, lyric poetry, and science; the Roma contributed the haunting music called the cante jondo (a form of flamenco), which, wrote García Lorca, “comes from remote races and crosses the graveyard of the years and the fronds of parched winds. It comes from the first sob and the first kiss.” Even the Vandals, Huns, and Visigoths who swept across Spain following the fall of Rome are remembered in words and monuments, which prompted García Lorca to remark, “In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.”

In 1492, the year the last of the Moorish rulers were expelled from Spain, ships under the command of Christopher Columbus reached America. For 300 years afterward, Spanish explorers and conquerors traveled the world, claiming huge territories for the Spanish crown, a succession of Castilian, Aragonese, Habsburg, and Bourbon rulers. For generations Spain was arguably the richest country in the world, and certainly the most far-flung. With the steady erosion of its continental and overseas empire throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, however, Spain was all but forgotten in world affairs, save for the three years that the ideologically charged Spanish Civil War (1936–39) put the country at the centre of the world’s stage, only to become ever more insular and withdrawn during the four decades of rule by dictator Francisco Franco. Following Franco’s death in 1975, a Bourbon king, Juan Carlos, returned to the throne and established a constitutional monarchy. The country has been ruled since then by a succession of elected governments, some socialist, some conservative, but all devoted to democracy.

Columbus, Christopher: fleetIllustration depicting Christopher Columbus's fleet departing from Spain in 1492.Kean Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Land

Spain is bordered to the west by Portugal; to the northeast it borders France, from which it is separated by the tiny principality of Andorra and by the great wall of the Pyrenees Mountains. Spain’s only other land border is in the far south with Gibraltar, an enclave that belonged to Spain until 1713, when it was ceded to Great Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Elsewhere the country is bounded by water: by the Mediterranean Sea to the east and southeast, by the Atlantic Ocean to the northwest and southwest, and by the Bay of Biscay (an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean) to the north. The Canary (Canarias) Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwestern African mainland, and the Balearic (Baleares) Islands, in the Mediterranean, also are parts of Spain, as are Ceuta and Melilla, two small enclaves in North Africa (northern Morocco) that Spain has ruled for centuries.

Ibiza city and port, Spain.Josef Muench Relief

La ManchaIsolated farmstead in the region of La Mancha in the southern Meseta Central, south-central Spain.© wellych/Fotolia

Teide Peak on Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Iberian Peninsula; International Space StationThe Iberian Peninsula seen from the International Space Station, July 26, 2014.NASASpain accounts for five-sixths of the Iberian Peninsula, the roughly quadrilateral southwestern tip of Europe that separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. Most of Spain comprises a large plateau (the Meseta Central) divided by a mountain range, the Central Sierra (Sistema Central), which trends west-southwest to east-northeast. Several mountains border the plateau: the Cantabrian Mountains (Cordillera Cantábrica) to the north, the Iberian Cordillera (Sistema Ibérico) to the northeast and east, the Sierra Morena to the south, and the lower mountains of the Portuguese frontier and Spanish Galicia to the northwest. The Pyrenees run across the neck of the peninsula and form Spain’s border with France. There are two major depressions, that of the Ebro River in the northeast and that of the Guadalquivir River in the southwest. In the southeast the Baetic Cordillera (Sistema Penibético) runs broadly parallel to the coast to merge with the mountains of the Iberian Cordillera. Along the Mediterranean seaboard there are coastal plains, some with lagoons (e.g., Albufera, south of Valencia). Offshore in the Mediterranean, the Balearic Islands are an unsubmerged portion of the Baetic Cordillera. The Canary Islands in the Atlantic are of volcanic origin and contain the highest peak on Spanish territory, Teide Peak, which rises to 12,198 feet (3,718 metres) on the island of Tenerife.

Spain has some of the oldest as well as some of the youngest rocks of Europe. The entire western half of Iberia, with the exception of the extreme south, is composed of ancient (Hercynian) rocks; geologists refer to this Hercynian block as the Meseta Central. It constitutes a relatively stable platform around which younger sediments accumulated, especially on the Mediterranean side. In due course these sediments were pushed by major earth movements into mountain ranges. The term meseta is also used by geographers and local toponymy to designate the dominating relief unit of central Iberia. As a result, the Meseta Central defined by relief is subdivided by geology into a crystalline west (granites and gneisses) and a sedimentary east (mainly clays and limestones). The northern Meseta Central, which has an average elevation of 2,300 feet (700 metres), corresponds to the tablelands, or plateau, of Castile and León, although it is in fact a basin surrounded by mountains and drained by the Douro (Duero) River. The southern Meseta Central (the Meseta of Castile–La Mancha) is some 330 feet (100 metres) lower. Its relief is more diverse, however, owing to heavy faulting and warping caused by volcanic activity around the Calatrava Plain and to two complex river systems (the Guadiana and the Tagus) separated by mountains. Its southern plains rise gradually to the Sierra Morena. The southeastern side of this range drops almost vertically by more than 3,300 feet (1,000 metres) to the Guadalquivir depression. Dividing the northern and southern Mesetas are the Central Sierras, one of the outstanding features of the Iberian massif. Their highest points—Peñalara Peak at 7,972 feet (2,430 metres) and Almanzor Peak at 8,497 feet (2,590 metres)—rise well above the plains of the central plateau. In contrast, the granitic Galician mountains, at the northwestern end of the Hercynian block, have an average elevation of only 1,640 feet (500 metres), decreasing toward the deeply indented (ria) coast of the Atlantic seaboard.

Part of Alpine Europe, the Pyrenees form a massive mountain range that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Bay of Biscay, a distance of some 270 miles (430 km). The range comprises a series of parallel zones: the central axis, a line of intermediate depressions, and the pre-Pyrenees. The highest peaks, formed from a core of ancient crystalline rocks, are found in the central Pyrenees—notably Aneto Peak at 11,168 feet (3,404 metres)—but those of the west, including Anie Peak at 8,213 feet (2,503 metres), are not much lower. The mountains fall steeply on the northern side but descend in terraces to the Ebro River trough in the south. The outer zones of the Pyrenees are composed of sedimentary rocks. Relief on the nearly horizontal sedimentary strata of the Ebro depression is mostly plain or plateau, except at the eastern end where the Ebro River penetrates the mountains to reach the Mediterranean Sea.

Cows grazing high in the central Pyrenees, Huesca province, Spain.age fotostock

A series of sierras trending northwest-southeast forms the Iberian Cordillera, which separates the Ebro depression from the Meseta and reaches its highest elevation with Moncayo Peak at 7,588 feet (2,313 metres). In the southeast the Iberian Cordillera links with the Baetic Cordillera, also a result of Alpine earth movements. Although more extensive—more than 500 miles (800 km) long and up to 150 miles (240 km) wide—and with peninsular Spain’s highest summit, Mulhacén Peak, at 11,421 feet (3,481 metres), the Baetic ranges are more fragmented and less of a barrier than the Pyrenees. On their northern and northwestern sides they flank the low-lying and fairly flat Guadalquivir basin, the average elevation of which is only 426 feet (130 metres) on mainly clay strata. Unlike the Ebro basin, the Guadalquivir depression is wide open to the sea on the southwest, and its delta has extensive marshland (Las Marismas). Drainage

Although some maintain that “aridity rivals civil war as the chief curse of [historic] Spain,” the Iberian Peninsula has a dense network of streams, three of which rank among Europe’s longest: the Tagus at 626 miles (1,007 km), the Ebro at 565 miles (909 km), and the Douro at 556 miles (895 km). The Guadiana and the Guadalquivir are 508 miles (818 km) and 408 miles (657 km) long, respectively. The Tagus, like the Douro and the Guadiana, reaches the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal. In fact, all the major rivers of Spain except the Ebro drain into the Atlantic Ocean. The hydrographic network on the Mediterranean side of the watershed is poorly developed in comparison with the Atlantic systems, partly because it falls into the climatically driest parts of Spain. However, nearly all Iberian rivers have low annual volume, irregular regimes, and deep valleys and even canyons. Flooding is always a potential hazard. The short, swift streams of Galicia and Cantabria, draining to the northwestern and northern coasts, respectively, have only a slight or, at most, modest summer minimum. The predominant fluvial regime in Spain is thus characterized by a long or very long summer period of low water. This is the regime of all the major arteries that drain the Meseta as well as those of the Mediterranean seaboard, such as the Júcar and the Segura: for example, from August to September the Guadiana River usually has less than one-tenth of its average annual flow. Only the Ebro River has a relatively constant and substantial flow—19,081 cubic feet (540 cubic metres) per second at Tortosa—coming from snowmelt as well as rainfall in the high Pyrenees. In comparison, the flow of the Douro is only 5,050 cubic feet (143 cubic metres) per second. The flow of many Iberian streams has been reduced artificially by water extraction for purposes such as irrigation. Subterranean flow is well-developed in limestone districts.

The Júcar River flowing past a 14th-century castle at Cofrentes, Valencia, Spain.Robert Frerck/Odyssey Productions Soils

There are five major soil types in Spain. Two are widely distributed but of limited extent: alluvial soils, found in the major valleys and coastal plains, and poorly developed, or truncated, mountain soils. Brown forest soils are restricted to humid Galicia and Cantabria. Acidic southern brown earths (leading to restricted crop choice) are prevalent on the crystalline rocks of the western Meseta, and gray, brown, or chestnut soils have developed on the calcareous and alkaline strata of the eastern Meseta and of eastern Spain in general. Saline soils are found in the Ebro basin and coastal lowlands. Calcretes (subsoil zonal crusts [toscas], usually of hardened calcium carbonate) are particularly well-developed in the arid regions of the east: La Mancha, Almería, Murcia, Alicante (Alacant), and Valencia, as well as the Ebro and Lleida (Lérida) basins.

Soil erosion resulting from the vegetation degradation suffered by Spain for at least the past 3,000 years has created extensive badlands, reduced soil cover, downstream alluviation, and, more recently, silting of dams and irrigation works. Particularly affected are the high areas of the central plateau and southern and eastern parts of Spain. Although the origins of some of the spectacular badlands of southeastern Spain, such as Guadix, may lie in climatic conditions from earlier in Quaternary time (beginning 2.6 million years ago), one of the major problems of modern Spain is the threat of desertification—i.e., the impoverishment of arid, semiarid, and even some humid ecosystems caused by the joint impact of human activities and drought. Nearly half of Spain is moderately or severely affected, especially in the arid east (Almería, Murcia), as well as in much of subarid Spain (the Ebro basin). The government has adopted policies of afforestation, but some authorities believe that natural vegetation regrowth would yield more speedy and more permanent benefits. Climate

Spain is characterized by the overlap of one fundamental climatic division (between humid and semiarid and arid zones) by another (the threefold division of the peninsula into maritime, continental, and mountain climates). This complexity results from the peninsula’s size, which is large enough to generate a continental thermal regime; its location close to the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa, exposing it to both maritime and Saharan influences; and its mountainous relief, which not only produces its own climatic zones but also exaggerates local aridity through the creation of rain shadows on the mountains’ leeward sides.

The Pyrenees and the Cantabrian ranges play an important role in the Spanish climate, holding the warm, dry subtropical airstream over Spain during the summer months. In general, westerly winds from the North Atlantic are dominant most of the year, while the warm, dry Saharan airstream blows less frequently. Some local or seasonal winds are notable: the easterly levante (levanter) can bring as many as 15 consecutive days of dry, clear weather to the coastal strip in the region of the Strait of Gibraltar; the leveche brings a hot, dry, dust-laden wind that blights vegetation in spring from the southern sector to the Spanish Levantine lowlands (the provinces of Castellón, Valencia, and Alicante); and in spring and summer a wind from the same sector, the solano, carries unbearably hot, dry, suffocating weather over the Andalusian plain. Northern Spain, from Galicia to northern Catalonia (Catalunya, or Cataluña), is characterized by a temperate humid or maritime type of climate, having high rainfall and an average temperature in January of 43 °F (6 °C) near the coast but less than that inland and in the mountains. A Coruña (La Coruña) has a moderate annual temperature, ranging from 48 °F (9 °C) in winter to 64 °F (18 °C) in summer, and the annual rainfall is about 38 inches (965 mm). The rest of the peninsula has a Mediterranean type of climate with continental tendencies—i.e., hot toward the coast, relatively cold in the interior, humid only in the mountains, and dry elsewhere. Thus Albacete, in the southeastern part of the southern Meseta, varies between 40 °F (4 °C) in the winter and 75 °F (24 °C) in the summer, while the annual rainfall is less than 15 inches (380 mm). The valleys of the Ebro and the Guadalquivir also have a continental climate, the Ebro drier and colder and the Guadalquivir warmer and more humid. Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands enjoy more temperate weather, with higher rainfall in Catalonia, while the Canary Islands have a subtropical Atlantic climate. Plant and animal life Vegetation

Nearly half of Spain is covered by spontaneous vegetation of some sort, but only a small proportion (largely confined to the mountains) is classified as dense woodland. Northern Spain has heath and deciduous woodland (oak, beech). The mountains of the northern Meseta and the Iberian and Baetic cordilleras carry deciduous Portuguese oak; those of the central Pyrenees, the Iberian ranges, and the Central Sierras have diverse pine species. The rest, more than half of Spain, has a Mediterranean vegetation characterized by evergreen oak (Quercus ilex) and other drought-resistant plants commonly reduced to scrub status (matorral). An esparto grass (Lygeum spartum) is found in the steppes of La Mancha and the southeast; the esparto products of Spain (paper, rope, basketry), however, come from an associated alfa grass (Stipa tenacissima). Poplar and eucalyptus have become widespread since the 19th century. Wildlife

The proximity of Africa has given Spain more African species of wildlife than are found in the other Mediterranean peninsulas, while the Pyrenean barrier and the general extent of the country explain the number of indigenous species. The European wolf and the brown bear survive in the scarce wild areas of the northeast. The Barbary ape is possibly indigenous but is more likely an import from North Africa. It survives only under protection, at Gibraltar. The wild boar, ibex (wild goat), and red and fallow deer are more common. More than half of the bird species of Europe are found in Coto Doñana National Park, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir; the Spanish imperial eagle and other large species such as the eagle owl, the buzzard, and several varieties of pheasant are native to the high Pyrenees. Desert locusts have been known to invade southern Spain from North Africa. Fish

The country’s waters contain a diversity of fish and shellfish, especially in the southeast where Atlantic and Mediterranean waters mix (the Alborán Sea). Species include red mullet, mackerel, tuna, octopus, swordfish, pilchard (Sardinia pilchardus), and anchovy (Engraulis encrasicholus). Demersal (bottom-dwelling) species include hake and whiting. Striped dolphin and the long-finned whale inhabit the waters off southeastern Spain, and the bottlenose dolphin is found off the Ebro delta. Overfishing has tended to alter the balance of species. Catherine Delano Smith Vicente Rodriguez People Ethnic groups

Spain has been invaded and inhabited by many different peoples. The peninsula was originally settled by groups from North Africa and western Europe, including the Iberians, Celts, and Basques. Throughout antiquity it was a constant point of attraction for the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. From c. 1100 bce the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians began to establish settlements and trading posts, especially on the eastern and southern coasts. These outsiders found a mosaic of peoples, collectively known as the Iberians, who did not have a single culture or even share a single language. A kingdom called Tartessus, which flourished between 800 and 550 bce, ruled much of the valley of the Guadalquivir. Elsewhere political organization was less sophisticated, consisting of a number of city-states in the coastal regions and of clans in the interior and the northwest.

Spain: Ethnic compositionEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The Romans

The Phoenician and Greek presence was limited to small coastal regions. The Carthaginians were the first to move inland; late in the 3rd century bce they set out to conquer as much of the peninsula as they could. Yet their success led to intervention in Iberia from the Romans, who quickly drove out the Carthaginians and conquered much of the peninsula. The Romans, however, had to deal with a number of revolts, and it was only in 19 bce, after almost 200 years of warfare, that they secured their rule over all of Iberia. The Romans brought Iberia under a single political authority for the first time but did not try to impose a single culture on the inhabitants. Nevertheless, much of the indigenous elite adopted Roman culture and became Roman citizens, particularly in the south and east, where the Roman presence was strongest. The Visigoths

Roman power in Spain collapsed during the 5th century ce when a number of Germanic peoples—the Suebi, the Alani, the Vandals, and finally the Visigoths—invaded the peninsula. At the end of the 6th century, King Leovigild brought all of Spain under Visigothic rule, and his son Reccared imposed a single religion, Catholic Christianity, on the country. The Muslims

Visigothic rule did not last long. In 711 Muslim Arabs invaded Spain from North Africa and defeated the Visigothic ruler, King Roderick. They quickly conquered almost the entire peninsula and established Muslim states in Spain that were to last until 1492. Recent arrivals

The Muslims were the last new peoples to arrive in Spain in large numbers for many centuries. Indeed, from the 16th century on and especially during the 100 years after 1860, Spain was a country of emigration rather than immigration. This began to change in the 1980s when Spain’s new position as a highly industrialized and relatively prosperous country made it attractive to people from the developing world. For the first time since the Middle Ages, Spain received large numbers of immigrants. By the early 21st century there were several million legal foreign residents and illegal immigrants in Spain, the latter concentrated mainly in Andalusia (Andalucía), in metropolitan Madrid and Barcelona, and in the Balearic and Canary islands. Most foreign residents came from other countries of the European Union (EU) and from Latin America. Many also arrived from Morocco, often crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in small boats, and from sub-Saharan Africa, arriving often at the Canary Islands; there also are significant numbers of Asians and Europeans from non-EU countries. Since 1985 Spanish governments have passed several laws on foreigners, which have made it more difficult for people to enter Spain and easier for the authorities to deport them. Promulgated in 2000 (and subsequently modified), the Law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners in Spain and Their Social Integration sought to end the restrictive policies of the previous 15 years, terminating the practice of repatriating illegal immigrants and giving legal status to any employed illegal immigrant who resided in Spain for at least two years. In 2005 legislation legalized the status of many immigrant workers. The law also gave immigrants most of the same rights as Spanish citizens (except the right to vote). The Gitano minority

The one ethnic minority of long standing in Spain is the Roma (Gypsies), who are known in Spain as Gitanos. Their traditional language is Caló. Many of them have assimilated into the mainstream of Spanish society, but others continue to lead their traditional nomadic way of life. The Gitanos were at one time most numerous in southern Spain, and, while there continue to be large populations in Andalusian cities such as Almería, Granada, and Murcia, large communities now exist in Madrid and Barcelona as well. Flamenco, an expressive song-dance form, has long been associated with the Gitanos.

Considerable prejudice and discrimination have existed against the Gitanos in Spain and are still prevalent today. But Gitanos have begun to create their own political organizations, such as the Union of the Gitano People (Unión del Pueblo Gitano; also known as the Unión Romaní), and some have been elected to parliament. There also are government programs that promote Gitano culture. Languages

The official language of Spain is Castilian. It is the country’s most widely spoken language, and outside Spain it is generally known as Spanish. The constitution of Spain allows for its autonomous communities to recognize their dominant regional languages and dialects as having official status along with Castilian. The statutes of 6 of the 17 autonomous communities stipulate the following “co-official” languages: Catalan in Catalonia and in the Balearic Islands, Valencian in Valencia, Galician (Gallego) in Galicia, and Euskera (Basque) in the Basque Country and in some Euskera-speaking territories of Navarra. Although not named a co-official language of Asturias, Bable (Asturian) is protected and promoted under the community’s statutes, as are local Aragonese dialects in Aragon. In addition, Aranese, spoken in the Aran Valley, is safeguarded in a provision by the region’s government, the autonomy of Catalonia. All of these languages except Euskera are Romance languages (i.e., they evolved from Latin). With no relation to any other language of the world, Euskera is what is known as a language isolate. Within their respective regions of dominance, many of the languages of Spain are taught regularly in school and are used in newspapers and radio and television broadcasts. Castilian

Castilian, which contains many words of Arabic origin, began as a dialect spoken in northern Spain. It became the language of the court of the kingdoms of Castile and León in the 12th century, and the dominance of Castile within Spain allowed it to become the official language of the state.

There are differences in accent and, to a lesser extent, in vocabulary in Castilian as it is spoken in various regions of the country. The most significant difference is in the pronunciation of c before i or e. In northern Castile, where the language is said to be spoken in its purest form, this is pronounced as an English th; in southern and western Spain it is pronounced as an English s. The prominence of people from these latter regions in the colonization of Latin America led to their pronunciation becoming the standard in American Spanish. The Cervantes Institute promotes the Spanish language and Spanish culture in many countries. Catalan

Catalan is closely related to Occitan (Provençal), a language spoken in southern France. It is spoken by more than four-fifths of the population in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. But there are differences in the way Catalan is spoken in these three regions, and in the 1980s there were politically motivated disputes as to whether Valencian was a Catalan dialect or a distinct language. Catalan literature, which has a long and distinguished history, flourished especially during the Middle Ages. However, it declined after the 15th century before reviving again in the period known as the Renaixença (“Renaissance”), which began in the mid-19th century. Galician

Spoken in Galicia, in the northwestern corner of Spain, the Galician language (Gallego) is closely related to Portuguese, although it has been influenced by Castilian Spanish throughout the modern period. It was the language of courtly literature until the 14th century, when it was displaced by Castilian. From then until the late 19th century, when a literary revival began, its use was limited to everyday speech, and it was more common in the countryside than in the cities due to a tradition of spoken Galician at home. Most of the population of Galicia is bilingual in Galician and Castilian. Euskera

Euskera is the most distinctive language spoken in Spain. Neither a Romance nor an Indo-European language, it predates the arrival of the Romans in Spain. Until the end of the 19th century, Euskera was spoken mostly in the countryside, and, unlike the other peninsular languages, it had no significant literary tradition. In the 20th century, especially after it became the official language of the Basque Country (Euskera: Euskadi; Spanish: País Vasco) in 1978, Euskera grew in popularity and was increasingly used in literature, journalism, and the electronic media. Moreover, it has been the regional government’s policy to extend its use in education and public administration. About one-third of the region’s population speaks Euskera, and another one-sixth comprehends it. The largest proportion of Euskera speakers live in the province of Guipúzcoa. Religion

Spain: Religious affiliationEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Roman Catholicism became the official religion of Spain in 589 and has been closely identified with the country ever since. The advent of political liberalism at the beginning of the 19th century led to a series of conflicts between church and state, especially over land ownership and the control of education. Even so, Catholicism remained the official religion of the state until the Second Republic (1931–36). After the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco restored it as the state religion, and it retained that status until the proclamation of the constitution of 1978. Since then Spain has had no official religion, but the Roman Catholic Church continues to receive financial support from the state. The legalization of divorce and abortion along with educational reforms in the 1980s brought the church into conflict with the government once again but with less intensity than previously.

The vast majority of the population is Roman Catholic, yet for many—and especially for those born after 1950—this has little meaning beyond being baptized, married, and buried within the church. There are several hundred thousand non-Catholic Christians in Spain. American-based denominations such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists as well as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) have been active in the country since the 1970s. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of adherents of Islam, whose numbers have grown rapidly because of immigration. Some 100,000 Jews fled Spain during the Spanish Inquisition in the late 15th century, when the inquisitor general Tomás de Torquemada persuaded the country’s rulers to expel any Jew who refused to be baptized. To remain in the country, many Jews converted to Christianity (becoming known as conversos); those known as Marranos converted to Christianity but continued surreptitiously to practice Judaism. Restrictions on Judaism were eased only in the 20th century, and by the early 21st century there were some 15,000 Jews in Spain. Adrian Shubert Vicente Rodriguez Settlement patterns Human landscape

The impact on the Spanish landscape of some 35,000 years of human occupation has been both diverse and profound. Human activity in prehistoric times undoubtedly led to changes in vegetation, soils, microrelief, and microclimate. However, influences from northern Europe (Celtic), the eastern Mediterranean (Phoenician, Ligurian, and eventually Roman), and North Africa (Iberian) contributed more obviously to what was to become the “traditional landscape” of Spain. Thus, most of Spain’s major towns have ancient origins: they began as Celtiberian settlements (Soria); as Phoenician colonies (Cádiz) and Phoenician or Greek trading emporiums (Tarragona, Ampurias, and Málaga); and as Roman commercial centres along the Mediterranean coast or military and administrative centres in the north and west, at nodal points in the road system (Mérida, León, and Zaragoza [Saragossa]). Such towns were surrounded by zones of intensive, irrigated agriculture (the barros of Évora, Portugal, the vegas of Mérida and Zaragoza, the huertas of the east coast).

Old northwest section of Almería, Spain.Richard Wilkie/Black Star

The Roman legacy of a gridiron town plan is preserved in many northern centres (e.g., in Barcelona and Zaragoza) but has been largely obliterated in the cities of the south and east by Muslim urban elements. In towns such as Valencia, Córdoba (Cordova), Toledo, Almería, Granada, and Sevilla (Seville), the marketplace, mosque, and high-walled domestic compounds, often with watered gardens, dominate an intricate alley network. Like their Roman antecedents, these early medieval Muslim centres were surrounded by rich agricultural huertas; in both towns and huertas water usage was rigorously controlled by institutions such as the Tribunal de las Aguas de la Vega de Valencia.

Alley in Toledo, Spain.© Digital Vision/Getty Images

After the Reconquista (Reconquest), the establishment of isolated single farms (alquerías) within the huertas increased. In Castile and León, medieval urban settlement developed from Christian military foundations in an open landscape of extensive dry farming. Centres such as Pamplona, Burgos, Soria, Valladolid, and Salamanca comprised a series of walled nuclei until new squares and broad streets were laid out in the 17th century. Rural settlement in León and in the mountains of northern Andalusia focused on the ecclesiastical granges of the Reconquista, developing into small villages. In Castile and León, castles similarly gave rise to clusters of hamlets. Much of this rural settlement was the result of spontaneous peasant colonization based on a now largely lost communal farming (open-field) system. In contrast, in Castile–La Mancha (Castilla–La Mancha), lower Aragon, Andalusia, Extremadura, and parts of the Alentejo, Portugal, the rural settlement pattern testifies to the more-organized resettlement schemes of the Reconquista in the southern Meseta. Here the four great Christian military orders (the Hospitallers, the Templars, the Order of Santiago, and the Order of Calatrava) acquired vast territories, which they defended with fortresses and huge, widely spaced villages, the latter sometimes now so large as to take on an urban aspect (agrotowns). Among these, in parts of Andalusia and Alentejo, are the courtyard farms (cortijos, montes) of the latifundios (very large estates). Catherine Delano Smith Vicente Rodriguez Migration

Spaniards participated fully in the massive 19th- and early 20th-century European immigration to the Americas. Between 1846 and 1932 nearly five million Spaniards went to the Americas, mostly to South America in general and to Argentina and Brazil in particular. Only Britain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany had more emigrants. Significant numbers of Spaniards also immigrated to Algeria and France.

The pattern of Spanish emigration changed after World War II. Continental Europe, especially France, West Germany, and Switzerland, displaced Latin America as the favoured destination for Spanish emigrants. Between 1962 and 1976 almost two million Spaniards, mainly from Andalusia and Galicia, went to other European countries. Beginning in the 1980s, however, as the Spanish economy improved, there was very little permanent emigration from Spain. Indeed, there was a reverse in migration flows as more than 20,000 Spanish citizens, many of them retired, returned from other European countries each year. This tide turned again in the early 21st century as Spain’s economy soured, and by 2012 the unemployment rate had topped 25 percent. More than half of Spaniards under age 25 were unable to find work, and recent university graduates increasingly looked abroad for opportunities.

The number of emigrants has been dwarfed by the number of people moving within Spain itself. Almost 10 million Spaniards moved from one province to another between the early 1970s and mid-1990s, significantly affecting the distribution of population within the country. Until the mid-1970s, most internal migrants left rural areas seeking industrial jobs in the larger cities, especially Madrid and Barcelona, and in the Basque Country and Valencia. During the 1980s the decline of Spain’s traditional industries prompted a return migration to the less-industrialized provinces. In the 1990s the focal points for migration were medium-sized cities (with 10,000 to 50,000 inhabitants), regions with strong service sectors, and the fringes of large and medium metropolitan areas. Urbanization

During the first half of the 20th century, most Spaniards lived in villages or in towns of fewer than 10,000 people, but by the early 21st century more than three-fourths of the population lived in urban areas. The most intense growth took place in a handful of the largest cities: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Zaragoza, Málaga, and Murcia. Spanish cities recorded some of the highest population densities in the Western world. This explosive urban growth occurred with very little planning, and many migrants to the cities could find housing only in cheaply constructed apartment blocks in outlying districts that lacked adequate municipal services.

Spain: Urban-ruralEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Since 1978 democratically elected municipal governments in many cities have tried to alleviate some of the worst effects of the uncontrolled urban boom of the 1960s. They acquired more parkland and began to provide a variety of public cultural facilities. Meanwhile, growth in the larger metropolitan areas has shifted from the central cities to the suburbs. Even smaller cities, such as Valladolid, León, and Granada, have begun to suburbanize. Demographic trends

Spain: Age breakdownEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Population density of Spain.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Spain experienced the traditional preindustrial pattern of high birth and death rates throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, but both began to decline shortly after 1900. The slow but continuous fall of birth rates stalled during the 20 years after the Spanish Civil War, when the Franco regime (1939–75) followed policies that encouraged large families. In the late 1960s the decline resumed. The low birth rate, which was especially marked among young women, contributed to a rate of natural increase that was near zero at the end of the 20th century, though in the beginning of the 21st century there was an upturn fuelled by the birth rate among the immigrant population.

Death rates declined steadily after 1940, although they rose slightly during the 1990s as the population aged. However, life expectancy in Spain increased dramatically, and by the end of the 20th century it was among the highest in the world. The greatest improvement was in the area of infant mortality. The striking overall change was a result of the higher standard of living made possible by the economic “miracle” of the 1960s and by the general availability of high-quality medical care through the government-sponsored system.

By the 1990s Spain’s major demographic indicators were similar to those of other industrialized countries of western Europe. As birth rates and death rates declined and life expectancy increased, the Spanish population aged significantly during the final decades of the 20th century, posing a growing challenge to the Spanish economy and society.

The Spanish population grew rapidly in the 30 years after the Civil War, in part because the death rate fell more quickly than the birth rate but also because of changes in marriage patterns. In the years immediately after the war, economic hardship discouraged people from marrying, and the average age at first marriage rose. By the mid-1940s, however, the percentage of those who married grew significantly (especially among women), reaching its highest level between 1955 and 1960 and remaining high until the mid-1970s, when it began to decline markedly. Likewise the average age at first marriage decreased until the 1990s, when it began climbing again. By the end of the 20th century the average age of first marriage for women had risen again (to between 25 to 29), and the average age at which women had their first child was about 30.

Beginning in the 1970s, Spaniards also began to have fewer children, and at the turn of the 21st century the total fertility rate was one of the lowest in Europe and well below the rate of replacement. The size of the average household also declined during this period, and the number of Spaniards living in traditional households, composed of a married couple and their children, also dropped. Economy

The Spanish economy began to industrialize in the late 18th century, and industrialization and economic growth continued throughout the 19th century. However, it was limited to a few relatively small areas of the country, especially to Catalonia (where textile manufacture took hold) and the Basque Country (where iron and steel were made). The overall pace of economic growth was slower than that of the major western European countries, so that by the early 20th century Spain appeared poor and underdeveloped compared with countries such as Great Britain, Germany, France, and even Italy.

The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath left Spain even farther behind, and the economic policies of the Franco regime failed to revitalize the economy. For nearly two decades after the war, the government followed a policy of autarky, or national economic self-sufficiency, similar to the policies of the pre-World War II fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. This approach entailed high levels of government intervention through highly protective tariffs, currency regulation, marketing boards for agriculture, and import controls. There was also a high degree of government ownership, realized through the National Industrial Institute (INI), which was created in 1941 to develop defense-related industries and other industries ignored by the private sector. The self-imposed economic isolation was reinforced by the Western democracies, which shunned Spain after 1945 because of its “fascist” government. Spain did not receive Marshall Plan aid from the United States and was excluded from a number of international organizations.

Spain’s autarkic policies were a failure, and by the late 1950s the country was on the verge of economic collapse. This crisis led to a major change in economic policy, and in 1959 a team of technocrats announced the Economic Stabilization Plan. This plan allowed a less-restrained market economy and the fuller integration of Spain into the international capitalist economy. The Stabilization Plan set the stage for the period of rapid economic growth known as the Spanish economic miracle. From 1960 until 1974 Spain’s economy grew an average of 6.6 percent per year, more quickly than that of any country in the world except Japan, and agriculture fell from being the most important sector of the economy in terms of employment to the least.

Spain’s economic miracle occurred during a period of high prosperity in the West, and it was largely dependent on these favourable external circumstances. Three factors were especially important. The first was foreign investment in Spain. Limited under the policy of autarky, it increased rapidly once the economy had been liberalized. The United States was the most important source, followed by West Germany. The second significant factor was tourism. General prosperity made foreign travel possible for many Europeans and North Americans. With its many beaches, warm climate, and bargain prices, Spain became an attractive destination, and tourism quickly became the country’s largest industry. The third factor was emigrant remittances. From 1959 to 1974 more than one million Spaniards left the country. The vast majority went to Switzerland, West Germany, and France, countries whose growing economies were creating a massive demand for unskilled labour. There they joined Portuguese, Italians, Yugoslavs, and Turks as “guest workers.” These emigrants sent large sums of money back to Spain—more than $1 billion in 1973 alone.

The great dependence on external conditions, however, made Spain’s economic growth vulnerable to economic changes elsewhere as the Franco era ended. The oil crisis of 1973, which initiated an extended period of inflation and economic uncertainty in the Western world, brought Spain’s economic growth to a halt. Political instability following Franco’s death in 1975 compounded these problems. The clearest sign of change was the dramatic increase in unemployment. The unemployment rate rose from 4 percent in 1975 to 11 percent by 1980, before peaking at more than 20 percent in 1985.

Economic growth returned, however, during the late 1980s, spurred by industrial restructuring and integration into the European Economic Community (EEC). Although growth rates were well below those of the 1960s, they were still among the highest in western Europe. Unlike the earlier boom, this one was accompanied by high inflation and continuing high unemployment, which, though lower than in previous years, were nonetheless significantly higher than the EEC averages. Although unemployment began to drop, at 16 percent in 1990 it was almost double the average for the EEC. Young people trying to join the workforce for the first time were hit particularly hard.

During the 1990s, Spain’s economy stabilized, unemployment declined (largely because of the rapid expansion of the services sector), and inflation eased. This economic recovery resulted partly from continuing integration into the single European market and from the government’s stability plan, which reduced budget deficits and inflation and stabilized the currency. The government pursued this policy of economic stabilization to enable Spain to qualify for the European economic and monetary union outlined in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty (formally the Treaty on European Union). The government also began privatizing state-owned enterprises. Moreover, Spain succeeded in qualifying for the euro, the EU’s common currency; in 1999 the euro was introduced as a unit of exchange, although the Spanish peseta (the value of which was locked to that of the euro) remained in circulation until 2002. In the early 21st century, Spain had one of the strongest economies in the EU. Foreign direct investment in the country tripled from 1990 to 2000. Moreover, since 2000, a large number of South Americans, eastern Europeans, and North Africans have immigrated to Spain to work in the construction industry, which contributes about one-tenth of the gross domestic product (GDP).

The global financial downturn that began in 2008–09 took root in the euro zone (see euro-zone debt crisis), and Spain was one of the countries hardest hit. Spanish banks, undercapitalized and suffering the effects of a burst housing bubble, dragged down an already ailing economy. The government’s initial attempts to stimulate the economy proved insufficient, and Spanish bond yields—the benchmark of the country’s ability to borrow—rose to dangerous levels. Unemployment skyrocketed as a succession of governments introduced austerity measures in an effort to restore confidence in the Spanish economy. In 2012 Spain accepted a €100 billion (about $125 billion) bailout package from the EU, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to recapitalize its banks. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing Agriculture

Basque shepherds, Navarra, Spain.Koldo Chamorro/Ostman Agency

Because of the relative decline of agriculture since the 1960s, Spain’s rural population decreased and many farms disappeared. Spanish agriculture has remained relatively backward by western European standards: capital investment per hectare is about one-fifth the average for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the vast majority of farms are small. Since Spain joined the EEC in 1986, the Spanish agricultural sector has had to respect Europe-wide policies. As a result, many small-scale operations, especially in grape growing and dairying, had to cease. Since the mid-1990s, however, the amount of agriculturally productive land (especially land dedicated to organic farming) in Spain has increased through irrigation and the conversion of fallow lands.

Vegetables, fruits, and cereals are the principal crops, accounting for about three-fourths of Spain’s agricultural production (in terms of value), with cereals the principal crops. Barley and wheat, the major crops in Spain, predominate on the plains of Castile-León, Castile–La Mancha, and Andalusia, while rice is grown in coastal Valencia and southern Catalonia. Corn (maize), grown in the north, is a major fodder product. Other crops include cotton; tobacco (grown in Extremadura); sugar beets (grown mainly in the Duero and Guadalquivir valleys); olives (produced in the south), a large portion of which are used for oil; and legumes (beans, lentils, and chickpeas). Fruit growing is also significant, with citrus fruits, especially oranges (grown in the regions of Valencia and Murcia), being of greatest importance. Other fruit crops include apples, apricots, bananas, pears, peaches, and plums. Spain also produces vegetables (especially tomatoes, onions, and potatoes) and nuts (almonds).

Because Spain is one of the world’s largest producers of wine, grape growing is of considerable importance. The main wine-producing areas are La Rioja, the Penedès in Catalonia, Valdepeñas in Castile–La Mancha, the Duero valley in Valladolid, and Málaga and Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia, which is also the centre of sherry production.

The raising of livestock accounts for just under half the value of Spain’s total agricultural output. Pigs are raised mainly in Castile-León, Aragon, and Catalonia, and pork leads meat production in Spain, followed by poultry, beef, and lamb. In the Atlantic coastal regions and the dry southern interior, sheep and dairy cows are raised. Forestry

Forests cover more than one-third of the total land area of Spain, with much of this woodland in the Cantabrian Mountains. Forestry contributes only a tiny fraction to Spain’s agricultural production. Important forestry products are cork, eucalyptus, oak, pine, and poplar. Because centuries of erosion, harvesting of firewood, and the creation of pastureland had resulted in the disappearance of many of the country’s forests, the government initiated reforestation efforts in the 1940s that are still in progress. Fishing

With about 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of coastline, Spain has long had an important fishing industry, which relies on fishing grounds off its coast and as far away as the Pacific and Indian oceans. The main fishing ports are in the northwest, especially Vigo and A Coruña. The activities of the commercial fishing fleet led to conflicts between Spain and a number of other countries, especially Morocco and Canada. On a number of occasions Spanish fishermen have been arrested for fishing illegally in these countries’ waters. Spain’s total catch declined during the 1980s and ’90s, but the fishing sector still accounted for about 1 percent of GDP, and fish remain an important component of the Spanish diet. Moreover, as the catch from sea fishing has declined, Spanish producers have increasingly developed coastal fish farming as an alternative. Resources and power

Spain has one of Europe’s most important and varied mining industries. Coal—produced mainly in the Cantabrian Mountains, the eastern Iberian Cordillera, and the Sierra Morena—accounts for a significant proportion of the country’s total mineral production. Other major products include metals such as iron, copper, lead, zinc, tungsten, uranium, mercury, and gold. In order to compete with other EU countries, however, the Spanish mining industry has been forced to restructure. This need has been most urgent in Asturias, where it has led to strong protests by coal miners against government policies.

Despite the long-standing prominence of the mining industry, in general, Spain’s mineral resources are limited, and the country’s once-plentiful coal reserves are no longer sufficient for its energy needs. Moreover, Spain has virtually no petroleum of its own, and the commercial potential of its natural gas fields is limited. As a result, Spain, once a mineral-exporting country, now imports minerals on a large scale, including both coal and petroleum.

Thermal power plants, located near coal fields or ports that receive imported oil, supply about half of Spain’s electricity needs. The country also relies heavily on hydroelectric power, mainly provided by its northern rivers, which create about one-sixth of its electricity. To address its energy shortage, the Spanish government adopted an ambitious nuclear energy program in the 1960s. The first nuclear power plant began operating in 1968, and several additional plants went online in the 1980s. In 2006 the 1968 plant was closed, and the government sought to move toward renewable energy. In fact, in the early 21st century, Spain became one of the EU’s leading exponents of renewable energy, including solar and wind power. In 2007 solar thermoelectric power plants opened near Sevilla, and there are wind parks throughout the country. Manufacturing

Spain’s early industrialization took place behind high tariff walls, and most industries remained small in scale, partly because of a lack of adequate raw materials and investment capital and partly because of weak domestic demand. Historically, industrial production has been concentrated on the northern coast and in the Basque Country, Catalonia, and the Madrid area while other parts of Spain underwent little industrial development. The liberalization of the economy in the 1960s and the influx of foreign investment, however, added a number of large firms. It also helped Spanish industry to diversify. The most striking example of this change was the automobile industry. Before 1960 Spain built few motor vehicles, but by the end of the 1980s it was producing 1.5 million vehicles in factories owned by Ford, Renault, General Motors, and the Spanish firm SEAT (largely owned by Volkswagen). During the 1990s, further liberalization of Spanish industry took place as the government privatized state-owned industrial enterprises, and telecommunications deregulation spurred an expansion of infrastructure. Meanwhile, Spanish firms, encouraged by government policy, began to address their traditional reliance on imported technologies by increasing their budgets for research and development.

Iron, steel, and shipbuilding have long been the dominant heavy industries in Asturias and the Basque Country, but in the 1970s and ’80s they began to decline because of outdated technology and rising energy costs. Much of this heavy industry was replaced by firms specializing in science and technology, a reflection of the government’s large-scale investment in the development of biotechnology, renewable energy sources, electronics, and telecommunications. The production of cotton and woolen textiles, paper, clothing, and footwear remains significant in Catalonia and neighbouring Valencia. Other leading industries include the manufacture of chemicals, toys, and electrical appliances (televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines). Consumer-oriented industries, such as food processing, construction, and furniture making, are located either close to their consumer markets in the larger cities or in rural areas where agricultural products and timber are close at hand. At the beginning of the 21st century, Madrid, Catalonia, and the Basque Country continued to dominate metallurgy, capital goods, and chemical production, but industrial production in a variety of sectors had expanded to new regions, such as Navarra, La Rioja, Aragon, and Valencia. Finance

During the Franco regime, Spanish banks played a primary role in industrial growth and came to control much of the country’s industry. The banking sector was so highly regulated that even the number of branches a bank could maintain was controlled. It was only at the very end of the regime, in 1974, that banking experienced the same kind of liberalization that had been applied to the economy as a whole in the 1960s. In 1978 foreign banks were permitted to operate in Spain, and by the 1990s dozens of foreign banks had established branches. By the late 1990s, however, the foreign share of the banking market had declined as some foreign banks left the country and others were acquired by Spanish banks. Capital flight became a major concern in the 21st century as both domestic and international account holders, fearing for the solvency of Spanish banks in the wake of the euro-zone crisis, shifted their funds abroad.

The central bank is the Banco de España (Bank of Spain). Having complied with the criteria for convergence, Spain joined the economic and monetary union of the EU in 1998, and the Banco de España became part of the European System of Central Banks. In addition to being the government’s bank, the Banco de España supervises the country’s private banks. It is responsible to the Ministry of the Economy. In 1999 Spain adopted the euro as its official monetary unit, and in 2002 the euro replaced the peseta as the national currency.

Although Spain has a large number of private banks, the banking industry has long been dominated by a handful of large institutions. During the 1990s, in preparation for incorporation into the European monetary union, the government encouraged bank mergers to create more competitive financial institutions, a trend that continued with renewed intensity in the 21st century. This process produced three large banking groups: the Banco de Santander Central Hispano, the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, and CaixaBank. Even the strongest Spanish banks, however, are of only moderate size by global standards, and at the beginning of the 21st century only the Banco de Santander Central Hispano ranked among the world’s leading financial institutions. Nonetheless, Spain’s banks grew dramatically in the first decade of the 21st century, although much of that growth was fueled by a housing and construction bubble that burst in 2009. The collapse in real-estate prices, combined with a freeze in global credit markets, left Spain’s banks exposed and overleveraged. Government intervention in the banking sector reached its peak in May 2012 with the nationalization of Bankia, Spain’s fourth largest bank and its largest mortgage lender.

Spain has traditionally had a second distinct set of banks known as cajas de ahorros (savings banks), which account for about half of the country’s total savings deposits and about one-fourth of all bank credit. These not-for-profit institutions originally were provincially or regionally based and were required to invest a certain amount in their home provinces, but now they are open to all parts of the country. Surpluses were put into reserves or used for local welfare, environmental activities, and cultural and educational projects. The largest of the savings banks is the Barcelona-based La Caja de Ahorros y de Pensiones (the Bank for Pensions and Savings), popularly known as “La Caixa.” La Caixa is the largest shareholder in the CaixaBank financial group, proof that the boundary between savings banks and commercial banks had become somewhat blurry in the 21st century. This distinction was almost completely erased in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis as reforms within the savings banking sector led to widespread consolidation and commercialization. Indeed, the Bankia group was created in 2010 by the merger of seven regional savings banks, and further restructuring within the sector was seen as a necessary step to strengthening it against future shocks.

Spain has stock exchanges in Madrid, Bilbao, Barcelona, and Valencia. Yet even the largest, the Madrid exchange, is quite small by international standards. The stock exchanges were deregulated in 1989, and during the 1990s their importance increased. Trade

Spain’s foreign trade grew rapidly during the late 20th century. The long-established pattern of imports outweighing exports continued, though earnings from tourism and other services balanced the country’s trade deficit in tangible goods. The largest share of Spain’s foreign trade is conducted within the EU; its two largest trading partners are France and Germany, and there is significant trade with Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Outside Europe the largest and most important trading partners are the United States and China. Spain also engages in significant trade with Japan.

Spain: Major import sourcesEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

During the mid-20th century, Spain was mainly an exporter of agricultural products and minerals and an importer of industrial goods. By the early 21st century, this pattern had changed, reflecting the increasing sophistication of the country’s economy. The main imported goods continued to be largely industrial in nature, including machinery and electrical equipment, motor vehicles, chemical and petroleum products, base metals, seafood, and paper products. But the principal exports included not only agricultural products but also motor vehicles, machinery and electrical equipment, processed iron products, chemical products, and clothing and footwear.

Spain: Major export destinationsEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Services

Compared with many western European countries, Spain’s service sector is less developed, but it is still a major sector of the Spanish economy. Tourism is among Spain’s leading industries, and the country is one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Spain receives more than 55 million visitors annually—more than 10 million more people than the country’s entire population. Most visitors are European, with British, French, and German tourists making up the majority. At the beginning of the 21st century, the tourism sector accounted for about one-tenth of Spain’s GDP and employment. Spain’s central government is responsible for tourism policies and for promoting tourism overseas, while regional authorities promote tourism in their own provinces. Labour and taxation

Spain’s 1978 constitution recognized the right of unions to exist and the right of all citizens, except those in the military, to join them. Both collective bargaining and the right to strike are guaranteed. The constitutional provisions regarding unions were fleshed out in the Workers’ Statute of 1980 and the Organic Law of Trade Union Freedom, which went into effect in 1985. The Workers’ Statute eliminated government involvement in labour relations, leaving negotiations to unions and management. Within firms, elected delegates or workers’ committees deal with management on issues of daily working conditions, job security, and, in some cases, wages. Worker representatives are elected for four-year terms.

There are a number of trade union federations, but the union movement as a whole is dominated by two: the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores; UGT), which is affiliated with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; PSOE) and is organized by sections (economic branches) and territorial unions; and the Workers’ Commissions (Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras; CC.OO.), which is affiliated with the Communist Party and is also structured by sectional and territorial divisions. Other unions include the Workers’ Syndical Union (Unión Sindical Obrera; USO), which has a strong Roman Catholic orientation; the Independent Syndicate of Civil Servants (Confederación Sindical Independiente de Funcionarios); the Basque Workers’ Solidarity (Euzko Langilleen Alkartasuna–Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos; ELA-STV), which is independent but has ties to the Basque Nationalist Party; and the General Confederation of Labour (Confederación General del Trabajo; CGT), the tiny remnant of the once-powerful anarcho-syndicalist union organization. Overall, with about one-sixth of its workforce belonging to unions, Spain has one of the lowest levels of unionization in Europe.

The outstanding feature of union activity after the demise of the Franco regime was the willingness of the major union organizations to sign agreements with the government and the employers’ organizations regarding employment, wage restraint, and social policy. Many such pacts were agreed upon between the late 1970s and the late 1990s.

The unions became less accommodating under the Socialist governments of Felipe González. The thrust of González’s economic policies was to make the Spanish economy more competitive in preparation for the full economic integration of the EU in the 1990s. This program included the reconversion through reprivatization or closing of money-losing state corporations, especially in the country’s “rust belt” of Asturias and the Basque Country, and the reduction of public spending in order to control the deficit.

The major unions refused to agree to further pacts with employers and the government. The UGT became much more critical of the PSOE, with which it had always been affiliated, and began to cooperate more closely with the CC.OO. In 1983 the government’s reconversion program prompted a series of strikes, mass demonstrations, and riots, especially in the north. In December 1988 the UGT and CC.OO. jointly called a widely supported national one-day general strike to protest the government’s policies. Plans for the downsizing of the coal, iron, and steel industries in Asturias also led to a one-day general strike in the region in October 1991. At the beginning of the 21st century, Spanish unions were working for increased job opportunities and greater job security for all workers. They also supported the idea of a more equitable distribution of wealth among regions and social groups, though unionization in Spain is still quite low.

There are three levels of taxation in Spain. Taxes may be imposed by the national government, the regional governments, and local authorities. Tax rates are progressive, ranging from about three-tenths of income to more than half. Spain has a corporate tax and a value-added tax. Transportation and telecommunications Railroads

Well into the 19th century, movement within much of Spain was difficult. The rivers were inadequate for transportation, and the many mountain ranges formed major barriers to overland travel. The situation improved with the construction of railroads. The first line, between Barcelona and Mataró, was built in 1848 and the second, between Madrid and Aranjuez, was built three years later. Most of the railroads were constructed by foreign investors, although the Spanish government provided major subsidies and other inducements. At the end of the 19th century, two groups of French investors controlled four-fifths of the railways in Spain.

In 1941 the rail system was nationalized, and virtually all the lines were incorporated into the National Network of Spanish Railroads (Red Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Españoles; RENFE). There are also regionally operated lines in the Basque Country, Valencia, and Catalonia. Lines generally start in Madrid and radiate outward in all directions. Transverse lines serve the Mediterranean and Ebro valley corridors. New equipment—including the Talgo, a light train designed by a Spaniard—was introduced in the 1960s and ’70s, and much of the track was electrified. However, the system constantly ran up huge losses, and in the 1980s a number of lines were eliminated. In 1990 the government announced a massive, long-term investment program for RENFE, the main goal of which was the introduction of superspeed trains, Alta Velocidad Española (AVE). These high-speed trains, first used on the Madrid-Sevilla line for the Expo ’92 world’s fair, make the journey from Sevilla to Madrid in less than three hours. An AVE train route between Madrid and Barcelona opened in 2008. Roads

The construction of a modern road network came after the building of the railways and was mostly achieved in the second half of the 20th century. The first motorway was begun in 1967. Like the railways, the road system is radial in design, with Madrid as its hub. Traffic on Spanish roads increased dramatically in the late 20th century, and both highways and city streets became heavily congested as the number of vehicles increased dramatically. In response, during the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, the central governments advanced plans to cover the country with an almost complete network of roads, some of which would be financed through private investment, and a toll system was proposed to fund highway maintenance. Air travel

The busiest of Spain’s many commercial airports, and one of the busiest in Europe, is Madrid’s Barajas Airport. Barcelona too has a major airport, and areas of tourism also serve international flights. The largest Spanish airline, the formerly government-owned Iberia, flies both domestic and international routes. Several other domestic and foreign airlines operate both regularly scheduled and charter flights, the latter accounting for a significant proportion of traffic to tourist destinations. By the end of the 20th century, increases in air travel made air traffic congestion a concern. Maritime transport

Largely surrounded by water, Spain has extensive coastlines and is heavily dependent on maritime transport, especially for international trade: more than four-fifths of imports and more than two-thirds of exports pass through the ports. Spain has one of the largest merchant marines in the world as well as one of the world’s most important fishing fleets. General traffic is very heavily concentrated in relatively few of Spain’s many ports, most notably in Algeciras (province of Cádiz), Barcelona, Bilbao, Las Palmas, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Tarragona, and Valencia. Other important ports include Huelva, Cartagena, A Coruña, and Ceuta. A fishing fleet is concentrated mainly in Galicia and the Basque Country. Telecommunications

During the 1980s and ’90s the telecommunications and information technology sectors developed quickly, mainly in or near Madrid and Barcelona. Two major companies, Telefónica (reorganized in 2000 into several companies) and Grupo Corporativo ONO, dominate the country’s telephone and cable television markets, respectively. Although initially much of the telecommunications sector was government-controlled, from 1998 the sector was liberalized and fully deregulated. Consumer use of various telecommunications products generally lagged behind that of the rest of western Europe, but the growth in the sector during the 1990s raised use to the European average. Internet use also grew rapidly during the late 1990s and into the early 21st century. Government and society

From 1833 until 1939 Spain almost continually had a parliamentary system with a written constitution. Except during the First Republic (1873–74), the Second Republic (1931–36), and the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Spain also always had a monarchy. For a complete list of the kings and queens regnant of Spain, see below.

From the end of the Spanish Civil War in April 1939 until November 1975, Spain was ruled by Gen. Francisco Franco. The principles on which his regime was based were embodied in a series of Fundamental Laws (passed between 1942 and 1967) that declared Spain a monarchy and established a legislature known as the Cortes. Yet Franco’s system of government differed radically from Spain’s modern constitutional traditions.

Under Franco the members of the Cortes, the procuradores, were not elected on the democratic principle of one person, one vote but on the basis of what was called “organic democracy.” Rather than representing individual citizens, the procuradores represented what were considered the basic institutions of Spanish society: families, the municipalities, the universities, and professional organizations. Moreover, the government—appointed and dismissed by the head of state alone—was not responsible to the Cortes, which also lacked control of government spending.

In 1969 Franco selected Juan Carlos de Borbón, the grandson of King Alfonso XIII, to succeed him as head of state. When Franco died in 1975, Juan Carlos came to the throne as King Juan Carlos I. Almost immediately the king initiated a process of transition to democracy that within three years replaced the Francoist system with a democratic constitution. Constitutional framework

The product of long and intense negotiations among the leading political groups, the Spanish constitution was nearly unanimously approved by both houses of the legislature (it passed 551–11 with 22 abstentions) in October 1978. In a December referendum, the draft constitution was then approved by nearly 90 percent of voters. The constitution declares that Spain is a constitutional monarchy and advocates the essential values of freedom, justice, equality, and political pluralism. It also provides for the separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Although the monarch is the head of state and the country’s highest representative in international affairs, the crown’s role is defined as strictly neutral and apolitical. The monarch is also commander in chief of the armed forces—though without actual authority over them—and the symbol of national unity. For example, when the new democratic constitution was threatened by a military coup in 1981, Juan Carlos in military uniform addressed the country on national television, defusing the uprising and saving the constitution. The monarch’s most important functions include the duty to summon and dissolve the legislature, appoint and accept the resignation of the prime minister and cabinet ministers, ratify laws, declare wars, and sign treaties decided upon by the government.

The legislature, known as the Cortes Generales, is composed of two chambers (cámaras): a lower chamber, the Congress of Deputies (Congreso de los Diputados), and an upper chamber, the Senate (Senado). As with most legislatures in parliamentary systems, more power is vested in the lower chamber. The Congress of Deputies has 350 members, who are elected to four-year terms by universal suffrage. The Senate is described in the constitution as the “chamber of territorial representation,” but only about one-fifth of the senators are actually chosen as representatives of the autonomous communities. The rest are elected from the 47 mainland provinces (with each province having four senators), the islands (the three largest having four and the smaller ones having one each), and Ceuta and Melilla (having two each).

The executive consists of the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, and the members of the cabinet. After consultation with the Cortes, the monarch formally appoints the prime minister; the cabinet ministers, chosen in turn by the prime minister, are also formally appointed by the monarch. The executive handles domestic and foreign policy, including defense and economic policies. Since the executive is responsible to the legislature and must be approved by a majority vote, the prime minister is usually the leader of the party that has the most deputies. The Congress of Deputies can dismiss a prime minister through a vote of no confidence. Regional government

For most of the period after 1800, Spain was a highly centralized state that did not recognize the country’s regional diversity. Decades of civil unrest followed Isabella II’s accession to the throne in 1833, as factions warred over the role of the Roman Catholic Church, the monarchy, and the direction of Spain’s economy. The constitution of the short-lived First Republic called for self-governing provinces that would be voluntarily responsible to the federal government; however, decentralization led to chaos, and by 1875 the constitutional monarchy was restored. For the rest of the 19th century, Spain remained relatively stable, with industrial centres such as the Basque region and Catalonia experiencing significant economic growth while most of the rest of Spain remained poor. Following Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898), many Spaniards viewed their country’s political and economic systems as unworkable and antiquated. Groups in Catalonia, the Basque region, and Galicia who wanted to free their regions from the “Castilian corpse” began movements for regional autonomy, and a number of influential regional political parties consolidated their strength. One of the stated goals of the Second Republic was to grant autonomy to the regions, as it did to Catalonia and the Basque provinces; however, self-government for these regions was not reinstated after the Civil War.

During the Franco years the democratic opposition came to include regional autonomy as one of its basic demands. While the 1978 constitution reflected this stance, it also was the product of compromise with the political right, which preferred that Spain remain a highly centralized state. The result was a unique system of regional autonomy, known as the “state of the autonomies.”

Article 2 of the constitution both recognizes the right of the “regions and nationalities” to autonomy and declares “the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation.” Title VIII states that “Adjoining provinces with common historic, cultural and economic characteristics, the islands and the provinces with a historical regional identity” are permitted to form autonomous communities.

The constitution classifies the possible autonomous communities into two groups, each of which has a different route to recognition and a different level of power and responsibility. The three regions that had voted for a statute of autonomy in the past—Catalonia, the Basque provinces, and Galicia—were designated “historic nationalities” and permitted to attain autonomy through a rapid and simplified process. Catalonia and the Basque Country had their statutes approved in December 1979 and Galicia in April 1981. The other regions were required to take a slower route, although Andalusia was designated as an exception to this general rule. It was not a “historic nationality,” but there was much evidence, including mass demonstrations, of significant popular support for autonomy. As a result, a special, quicker process was created for it.

By May 1983 the entire country had been divided into 17 comunidades autónomas (autonomous communities): the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia, Andalusia, Asturias, Aragon, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castile and León, Castile-La Mancha, Extremadura, Navarra, La Rioja, and the regions of Madrid, Murcia, and Valencia. In 1995 two autonomous cities, Ceuta and Melilla, were added.

The basic political institutions of each community are similar to those of the country as a whole. Each has a unicameral legislature elected by universal adult suffrage and an executive consisting of a president and a Council of Government responsible to that legislature.

The powers (competencias) to be exercised by the regional governments are also stated in the constitution and in the regional statute of autonomy. However, there were differences between the “historic nationalities” and the other communities in the extent of the powers that were initially granted to them. For the first five years of their existence, those communities that had attained autonomy by the slow route could assume only limited responsibilities. Nevertheless, they had control over the organization of institutions, urban planning, public works, housing, environmental protection, cultural affairs, sports and leisure, tourism, health and social welfare, and the cultivation of the regional language (where there was one). After five years these regions could accede to full autonomy, but the meaning of “full autonomy” was not clearly defined. The transfer of powers to the autonomous governments has been determined in an ongoing process of negotiation between the individual communities and the central government that has given rise to repeated disputes. The communities, especially Catalonia and Andalusia, have argued that the central government has dragged its feet in ceding powers and in clarifying financial arrangements. In 2005 the Cortes granted greater autonomy to Catalonia, declaring the region a nation in 2006.

By the beginning of the 21st century, the Spanish state had yet to achieve a form of regional government that was wholly acceptable to all its communities, but, whenever that happens, it will almost inevitably be an asymmetrical form in which the range of powers held by the regional governments will vary widely from one community to another. Local government

There are two further levels of government below the national and regional—provincias and municipios (provinces and municipalities). Their powers and responsibilities are set out in the Basic Law on Local Government (1985).

The provinces, in existence since 1833, originally served as transmission belts for the policies of the central government. Although they still perform this function, the provinces now also bring together and are dependent on the governments of the municipalities.

There are more than 8,000 municipal governments (ayuntamientos). Each has a council, a commission (a kind of cabinet), and a mayor (alcalde). Municipal councillors are elected by universal adult suffrage through a system of proportional representation. As in elections to the national parliament, votes are cast for party lists, not for individual candidates.

Municipal governments may pass specific local regulations so long as they conform to legislation of the national or regional parliament. While municipal governments receive funds from the central government and the regions, they can also levy their own taxes; in contrast, provincial governments cannot.

A provincial council (Diputación Provincial) is responsible for ensuring that municipalities cooperate with one another at the provincial level. The main function of these councils is to provide a range of services not available to the smaller municipalities and to develop a provincewide plan for municipal works and services. There are no provincial councils in the autonomous regions that comprise one province (Asturias, Navarra, La Rioja, Cantabria, Madrid, and Murcia). In the Basque Country, provincial councils are elected directly by universal adult suffrage. The islands, too, choose their corporate body by direct election; each of the seven main Canary Islands and the main Balearic Islands elect island councils (Cabildo Insular and Consell Insular, respectively). Justice

The judicial system, known as the poder judicial, is independent of the legislative and executive branches of government. It is governed by the General Council, which comprises lawyers and judges.

There are a number of different levels and types of courts. At the apex of the system is the Supreme Court, the country’s highest tribunal, which comprises five chambers. The National Court (Audiencia Nacional) has jurisdiction throughout Spain and is composed of three chambers (criminal, administrative, and labour). Each autonomous community has its own high court of justice (Tribunal Superior de Justica), and all the provinces have high courts called the audiencias that try criminal cases. Below these are courts of first instance, courts of judicial proceedings (which do not pass sentences), penal courts, and municipal courts. Created by law in 1981 and reporting to the Cortes, the ombudsman (defensor del pueblo) defends citizens’ rights and monitors the activities of all branches of government.

The Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional), which is not part of the judiciary, is responsible for interpreting the constitution and the constitutionality of laws and for settling disputes between central and regional powers regarding constitutional affairs. The Constitutional Court is composed of 12 members who are formally appointed by the monarch after being elected by three-fifths of both the Congress of Deputies and the Senate (four members each) and by the executive and the General Council (two members each). Political process

Voting is open to all citizens age 18 years or older. For elections to the Congress of Deputies, held every four years, each of the 50 provinces serves as an electoral district, with the number of deputies representing it determined by its population. Under a proportional representation electoral system governed by the d’Hondt formula, ballots are cast for a provincewide party list rather than for candidates representing individual constituencies. This formula favours large parties and less-populated areas.

About four-fifths of the members of the Senate are directly elected via a plurality system at the provincial level. Each province is entitled to four representatives; voters cast ballots for three candidates, and those with the most votes are elected. Because representation is not based upon population, in the Senate smaller and more-rural provinces generally are overrepresented in relation to their overall population. The remainder of the senators are appointed by the regional legislatures. For elections to the European Parliament, held every five years, and local elections, residents who are citizens of other EU countries are eligible to participate. Spain is among the countries with the highest proportion of women members of parliament, with women generally constituting about three-tenths of the Chamber of Deputies and about one-fourth of the Senate.

Electoral participation declined markedly after the initial enthusiasm of the transition to democracy, and by the early 1980s political commentators spoke of a desencanto (disenchantment) with the political system. Indeed, although support for democracy remained solid, the voting abstention rate increased throughout the 1980s, especially in local and regional elections. The trend was reversed in the 1990s, when about four-fifths of the electorate voted in national elections; however, in 2000 nearly one-third of the electorate abstained. Voter participation increased again in 2004, when about three-fourths of the electorate voted, only slightly greater than the heavy turnout for the 2008 election.

The constitution recognizes political parties as “the major instruments of political participation.” The Law of Political Parties (1978) provided them with public funding based on the number of seats they held in parliament and the number of votes received. National parties

The Spanish political scene is at once simple and complex. The simplicity rests in the fact that, since the beginning of democratic elections in 1977, national politics have been dominated by a small number of parties. From 1977 until 1982 Spain was governed by the Union of the Democratic Centre (Unión de Centro Democrático; UCD), and the major opposition party was the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; PSOE). The only other national parties of importance were the right-wing Popular Alliance (Alianza Popular; AP) and the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España; PCE).

In 1982 the PSOE came to power and governed until 1996. The UCD subsequently split into a number of smaller parties and was replaced as the leading opposition force by the Popular Party (Partido Popular; PP), which in 1989 became the successor to the AP. After faring badly in the national elections of 1982, the PCE became one of the founding members of the United Left (Izquierda Unida; IU) coalition in 1986.

The PP won a plurality in the elections of 1996 and formed a government with the support of Basque and Catalan nationalist parties. The PSOE assumed leadership of the opposition. By 2000 the PP controlled the majority of provincial and autonomous governments, and in that year it solidified its position by winning an absolute majority in the Cortes. In March 2004, however, following a series of terrorist bombings in Madrid—originally attributed by the government to the Basque separatist group ETA but subsequently linked to Islamic militants—the PSOE ousted the PP from national government. In 2008 the PSOE government won a second term, but the economic crisis that came to a boil in 2009 proved to be the party’s undoing. Amid widespread voter dissatisfaction, PSOE Prime Minister José Zapatero advanced the date of the scheduled 2012 general election to November 2011, and in that event the PP won a convincing victory. Regional parties

There also are parties that exist at the regional level only, with at least one in each of the 17 autonomous communities. Of these, the two most important are Convergence and Union (Convergència i Unió; CiU), a coalition of liberal and Christian democratic parties in Catalonia, and the Basque Nationalist Party (Basque: Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea [EAJ]; Spanish: Partido Nacionalist Vasco [PNV]), commonly referred to as the EAJ-PNV, which espouses a traditionally rooted moderate Christian nationalist ideology. The CiU has governed Catalonia for most of the period since 1979. The EAJ-PNV has led the regional government of the Basque Country since it was established in 1980 (ruling on its own or in coalition), and it has won a number of the region’s seats in the Congress of Deputies and the Senate. Other regional parties include the Canary Islands Coalition (Coalición Canaria; CC), with a centre-right ideology; the Galician Nationalist Bloc (Bloque Nacionalista Galego; BNG), a left-wing group; Basque Solidarity (Eusko Alkartasuna; EA), a left-wing party composed of former EAJ members; the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya; ERC), which advocates independence for Catalonia; and the Valencian Union (Unió Valenciana; UV), a centre-right nationalist party. Minor parties

The complexity of Spanish political life since the transition to democracy lies in the existence of a very large number of minor political parties. In the early 21st century there were several minor parties operating at the national level: the Spanish Green Party (Partido Verde Español; PVE), the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal; PL), and the Spanish Workers’ Party–Communist Unity (Partido de los Trabajadores de España–Unidad Comunista; PTE-UC).

One interesting feature of Spanish politics is that the authoritarian or nondemocratic right has remained almost totally insignificant. During the last quarter of the 20th century, no political group claiming to be the heir to Francoism ever won more than 1 percent of the vote in a national election. Security

Traditionally, Spain had compulsory nine-month military service for all adult males. However, beginning in 2002, conscription was ended and the military became professionalized. Spain’s national defense is supplemented by its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the United States maintains a naval base at Rota and an air base at Morón de la Frontera.

Domestic order is maintained by the National Police Corps (Cuerpo Nacional de Policía), which is primarily responsible for national investigations and security in urban areas, and the Civil Guard, established in 1844, which maintains security in rural areas and on the highways and controls the borders. These bodies were unified under the Ministry of the Interior to provide more efficiency in responding to security issues.

The state of the autonomies, a product of negotiation and compromise at the time of the transition to democracy, has come to be widely accepted by the Spanish people and by their political organizations, with one significant exception—the militant Basque nationalist movement, which has sought total independence and used terrorism as its principal method. As a result, domestic terrorism is a major concern of the Spanish police.

The nationalist movement in the Basque provinces before the Spanish Civil War was nonviolent. The inflexible centralism of the Franco regime and its repression of any expression of regional difference, however, were instrumental in stimulating the development of a more radical nationalism among Basque youth in the 1950s. Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty), best known by its Basque acronym, ETA, was created in 1959 and, influenced by anti-imperialist struggles in the developing world, quickly took up armed opposition. In December 1973 ETA assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s handpicked successor as head of the government.

So long as ETA was seen to be fighting against the Franco dictatorship, it received considerable sympathy both inside and outside the Basque provinces. Its continued use of violence during and after the transition to democracy cost it whatever support it had enjoyed in the rest of Spain. In the Basque Country itself the continuing use of terror led to much public revulsion and to demonstrations demanding the end to violence. Nevertheless, Batasuna, the political party generally considered to be the political wing of ETA, won between 15 and 20 percent of the votes cast in the Basque Country in regional and national elections until the Supreme Court voted to ban the party in 2003. As of the early 21st century, Basque terrorism had claimed more than 800 lives, and numerous cease-fire agreements had failed to result in a lasting peace. In 2011, however, ETA declared that it would permanently and unilaterally renounce violence as a means of achieving its political ends. In addition to combating ETA’s violence, the Spanish government in the early 21st century dedicated considerable resources to investigating and thwarting the activities of groups in Spain linked to al-Qaeda’s international terrorist network.

Other autonomous communities have had similar but much smaller and less significant illegal organizations whose terrorist activities have ceased, including the Terra Lliure (Free Country) in Catalonia and Exército Guerrilheiro do Pobo Galego Ceibe (Free Galician Guerrilla People’s Army) in Galicia. Health and welfare

Since the 1960s Spain’s increasing prosperity and the generalized availability of government-sponsored health care have combined to cause dramatic improvements in levels of health and well-being. By the beginning of the 21st century, life expectancy in Spain was among the highest in the world. Spain also had more doctors per capita than most other countries of the EU.

The health system is administered by the national Ministry of Health through a department known as the National Institute of Health (Insalud). However, as the system of regional autonomy developed, much of the responsibility for health care devolved to the regional governments, first to Andalusia, Galicia, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Valencia, the Canary Islands, and Navarra and later to other regions. The system provides a full range of services in clinics and in general and specialized hospitals. By the 1970s most villages had a doctor who received a salary from the Ministry of Health. During the 1980s a reform allowed people to attend any public clinic they wished; previously they had to go to the one that served their neighbourhood.

Health care is not a government monopoly, though all but a very small percentage of the population seeks treatment at state-run clinics. Many doctors have their own offices and clinics outside the government-funded system, and many private insurance plans are available. In addition, as part of planned health-care reform measures, some public hospitals and clinics are to be transferred from state to private administration.

The government, through its ad hoc social security office, provides a number of other social services, including unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, maternity and sickness benefits, and disability payments. These services are financed through deductions from workers’ pay, employer contributions, and general tax revenues from the state. Additional services by local authorities attempt to meet urgent health care needs of underserved groups. Housing

During the Franco era, housing shortages and standards were a major problem. In 1961 the government passed a National Housing Plan, which resulted in the construction of millions of homes over the next two decades. However, many of these homes were geared to affluent middle-class families; thus, by the 1980s, housing shortages were severe and conditions were still considered poor. After the election of the socialist government in 1982, significant resources were directed at housing. However, population growth continued to outstrip housing construction, and at the beginning of the 21st century many considered housing to be the country’s most pressing social problem. That perception, coupled with low interest rates and an infusion of foreign investment capital, fueled a construction boom that added millions of jobs to the Spanish economy. When the real-estate and construction bubble popped in 2009, thousands of developers went under, and Spain’s banks were saddled with more than €180 billion (about $225 billion) in toxic assets.

More than three-fourths of housing stock is owner-occupied. House types vary from region to region, but by and large multistory dwellings are characteristic of mountain and pastoral districts, while single-story or low houses with courtyards arranged in different ways according to the local economy are typical of the lowlands. Land reform, industrialization, and depopulation have significantly changed the character of many rural districts. In rural areas in particular, the housing stock is relatively old, with more than half of all units built prior to 1960. Increasingly population concentration in urban areas created difficult housing conditions and resulted in the rapid increase in housing prices, exacerbating problems for individuals with low incomes. These prices peaked in 2007–08, and the subsequent housing bust saw home values drop by as much as 75 percent. Because this adjustment had catastrophic effects on the rest of the economy, few were able to take advantage of the lowered prices, and much of the excess housing stock sat empty. Education

Spain’s first comprehensive public education plan was contained in the Moyano Law of 1857. It remained basically unchanged until 1970, when the General Law on Education was passed. Since then many other education reforms have taken place.

The school system has a number of levels: preschool (to age 6), primary school for ages 6 or 7 to 11, secondary school for ages 12 to 16 (which includes technical and vocational schools), baccalaureate school for ages 17 and 18, and university. Education is free and compulsory for children between the ages of 6 and 16. Literacy exceeds 95 percent of the population.

Historically, the state and the Roman Catholic Church have clashed over education. Spain still has a large private education sector, almost all of which is Catholic, but since the 1960s the predominance of the state has been clearly established, especially in secondary education. In the 1980s the Catholic schools, most of which received substantial subsidies from the state, were subjected to closer government control, and religious education was removed as an obligatory subject. With regional autonomy, control over education in some parts of the country was transferred from the central to regional governments. As a result, the study of Catalan, Galician, and Euskera became obligatory in their respective regions, whereas in the past these languages had not been taught at all.

After 1960 there was a dramatic increase in the availability of schooling at all levels. The change was greatest with regard to universities. Until 1960 there were only 12 universities in the country, and higher education was the privilege of a very small elite. By the end of the 20th century, there were more than 60 public and private universities, some of which were operated by the Catholic church. Access to a university education became more democratic as well: in the 1980s almost half of Spain’s university students had parents who had received no more than an elementary school education. By the early 21st century more than two-thirds of Spain’s college-age population was attending a university. Among the largest and most-prestigious universities in Spain are the Complutense University of Madrid (founded 1508), the University of Barcelona (1450), the University of Granada (1526), the University of Sevilla (1502), the University of Salamanca (1218), the University of Valencia (1499), and the University of the Basque Country (1968). Cultural life Cultural milieu

As in much of western Europe, the culture of Spain was marked decisively by the period of Roman rule. In language, religion, even architectural traditions, the Romans left a lasting legacy. However, the subsequent course of Spanish history added elements to the country’s cultural development that were missing or much weaker in other European countries. The most important differences stem from the Arabic-speaking Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa who invaded Spain in 711 ce and dominated much of the country for almost 800 years. The Muslim cultural influence was very strong, especially in the area of language; indeed, the Spanish language has taken more words from Arabic than from any other source except Latin. Through contact with Muslims, Christian Europe was able to recover much of the cultural and intellectual heritage of Classical antiquity. It also gained access to many scientific advances made by Muslims. Spain’s cultural mix was further enriched by the presence of a large and influential Jewish population, and medieval Spain witnessed one of the periods of greatest cultural achievement in Jewish history.

Court of the Myrtles in the Alhambra, Granada, Spain, 13th–14th century.Ardean Miller III/FPG

During the early modern and modern periods, Spain’s culture was fairly homogeneous. The one significant exception was the presence and persistence of early languages other than Castilian in some parts of the country. Two of these, Catalan and Galician (Gallego), developed significant literary traditions during the Middle Ages. From the 16th century on, however, they lost ground to Castilian and increasingly became limited to everyday use, especially among the peasantry. This had always been the case with the third language, Euskera (Basque), which never had a significant literary tradition.

Beginning in the 19th century, all three languages enjoyed a revival. In the 20th century the Franco regime prohibited the public use of languages other than Castilian, but this did not lead to their disappearance. Instead, the use of these languages, both in daily life and in high culture, increased greatly when they became the official languages in the autonomous regions established under the constitution of 1978. They are now taught in the schools and are used in the press and on television and radio.

For much of its history, and especially after the Reconquista was completed in 1492, Spain has been strongly identified with the Roman Catholic Church. To a large extent this identification and the virtual religious monopoly that the church has enjoyed since the 16th century have been artificially imposed. Members of the two large religious minorities were forced to convert or leave the country: the Jews in 1492 and the Muslims in 1502. From 1478 until 1834 religious uniformity was enforced by the church court, the Inquisition.

In the 19th and 20th centuries the Roman Catholic Church sought to have, and for much of that time succeeded in having, the government declare Roman Catholicism as the state religion, even though a large part of the population was nonpracticing or even anticlerical. The church also encouraged the government to limit or even prohibit the practice of other faiths. State support for the Catholic church was strongest during the Franco regime, but since 1978 Spain has had no official religion. Today Spaniards enjoy complete freedom of religion, although Roman Catholicism remains an important cultural influence. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, the expression of cultural diversity is easier than it was for at least 500 years. Ironically, this came at the same time that Spain became increasingly drawn into a homogeneous global culture. Daily life and social customs Organization of the day

Daily life in early 21st-century Spain looks little different from that in other industrialized countries of the West. There remain, however, some important practices that are peculiar to Spain. The most obvious, especially for foreign visitors, is the organization of the day and the scheduling of meals. Lunch, which is the main meal of the day, is eaten between 2:00 and 3:00 pm. Traditionally it was followed by a nap—the famous siesta—but, because most people now commute between home and work, this custom is in decline. Supper, a lighter meal, is also taken late, between 9:00 and 10:00 pm, or even later during the hot summer months.

Business, shopping, and school hours reflect this pattern. There is a long break—generally two to five hours long—in the middle of the day, during which most businesses are closed and the streets are not very busy. (The few exceptions are bars, restaurants, and the large department stores, which do not close at midday.) The main daily television news is broadcast at this time, as are some of the most popular programs. The workday resumes in the late afternoon, between 4:30 and 5:00 pm, and continues until about 8:00 pm. Food and drink

Bars, which are open all day, generally serve food as well as drink, and it is a widespread custom to go for a snack before meals, especially on non-working days. The most well-known bar food, known as tapas, usually consists of prepared dishes, many of which are quite elaborate and are often smaller versions of main-course dishes. There are hundreds of different tapas, but a few typical ones are mushrooms in garlic sauce, marinated seafood, Spanish omelette, lamb brochettes, and octopus in paprika sauce.

Spanish cooking varies greatly from region to region, linked to local products and traditions. Galicia, for example, is famed for its seafood, including dishes of baby eels and Vizcayan-style codfish; Catalonia is renowned for meat and vegetable casseroles; and Valencia is the homeland of paella, a rice dish made with seafood, meats, and vegetables. From Andalusia comes gazpacho, a delicious cold soup made of tomatoes, garlic, and cucumber, while the cattle-producing region of Castile boasts succulent roasts and air-dried hams. Spanish food is frequently thought to be very spicy, but, apart from a few dishes that contain small amounts of a mild chili pepper, the most piquant ingredient in general use is paprika. Otherwise, dishes are likely to be flavoured with such spices as tarragon and saffron. The most widely eaten meats are pork, chicken, and beef, but in much of the country lamb is eaten on special occasions. Very fond of both fish and shellfish, Spaniards are among the world’s largest consumers of seafood. Legumes, especially lentils and chickpeas, also form an important part of the Spanish diet.

Spaniards frequently drink wine and beer with their meals. They also commonly drink bottled mineral water, even though in most parts of the country the tap water is perfectly safe. At breakfast and after meals, strong coffee is the almost universal drink. Few people drink tea, but herbal infusions such as chamomile are popular. Soft drinks, both domestic and imported, are widely available. Internationalization of culture

The Franco regime sought to preserve what it understood as Spain’s long-standing traditions and to impose a strict Roman Catholic morality on the country. However, the economic policies of the 1960s that opened Spain up to foreign investment and tourism and encouraged Spaniards to work in other European countries also invited foreign influences, which undermined the government’s desire to protect or isolate Spanish culture. Since the 1960s Spanish culture, particularly the youth culture, has increasingly become part of a homogeneous, heavily American-influenced international culture.

For young people the most significant aspects of international culture are rock and contemporary dance music, both of which make up a considerable portion of the music played on Spain’s radio stations. Beginning with the Beatles in the 1960s, many leading foreign rock groups have given concerts in Spain’s major cities. In the 1990s dance clubs on the island of Ibiza frequented by young British vacationers became a hotbed for techno music, first called Balearic Beat by some (see Sidebar: Balearic Beat). There are also a large number of Spanish rock musicians, but few of these have achieved much recognition outside the country. The most successful of Spain’s popular singers is undoubtedly Julio Iglesias, whose music appealed to an older audience.

The internationalization of culture also can be seen in a variety of other ways. American fast-food chains have franchises in all the major cities, and much of the television programming and many of the popular films are foreign, the bulk of the programs and films being from the United States. Festivals and holidays

Traditionally, most holidays in Spain have been religious in origin. At the national level the most important of these are Holy (or Maundy) Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Corpus Christi, the Feast of Saint James (July 25), and All Saints’ Day (November 1). The most important day of the Christmas period, and the day on which children receive presents, is the Day of the Three Kings, or Epiphany (January 6).

By contrast, nonreligious, civic holidays have been relatively insignificant. The Franco regime declared July 18, the day on which the Spanish Civil War began, a national holiday, but that was abandoned after the demise of the regime. Since 1978 the official national holiday has been Constitution Day (December 6). Catalonia and the Basque Country have their own official “national” holidays, and each of the autonomous communities celebrates itself with a regional holiday.

One important holiday is both religious and civic. October 12 is the Day of the Virgin of El Pilar and also the day on which the “discovery” of America is celebrated (a counterpart to the celebration of Columbus Day in the United States); it has been called at different times the Day of the Race (Día de la Raza) and Hispanic Day (Día de la Hispanidad).

Every village and town has its own annual holiday fiesta, and these are probably the most important holidays in the daily lives of the Spanish people. These holidays are religious in origin, honouring the local patron saint or the Virgin Mary, but the religious component is often much less important than the dancing and bullfights that take place. Some of these celebrations, such as the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona (with its famous running of the bulls), the Sevilla fair, and the Fallas of Valencia, have become internationally famous and have turned into major tourist attractions. A thoroughly secular, unique festival is held in the little town of Buñol, near Valencia, where each August thousands of residents and visitors gather to hurl tomatoes at one another. The festival, called La Tomatina, began as a symbolic repudiation of harsh rule during the Franco era. It now celebrates the summer tomato harvest, but it is also a fine excuse to drink red wine, eat paella, and enjoy one another’s company.

The running (encierro) of the bulls during the Fiesta de San Fermín, Pamplona, Spain.© Blaine Harrington The arts

Spain has a long, varied, and distinguished artistic heritage, which includes some of the most important figures in the Western cultural tradition. A partial list would include novelists Miguel de Cervantes (the most important figure of Spanish literature) and Benito Pérez Galdós, dramatists Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega, painters Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, and Pablo Picasso, and filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

The period from about 1500 to 1681, known as the Golden Age, is considered the most brilliant era of Spain’s artistic history, with enduring contributions made in the fields of literature, theatre, architecture, and painting. Still, at no time has Spain ceased to be a culturally vital country, and the 20th century in particular proved a highly productive and creative one; indeed, its first few decades came to be called the Silver Age.

The Spanish Civil War marked a break in the development of the arts. Many leading artists and intellectuals went into exile at the end of the war. Within Spain the Franco regime practiced a sweeping censorship that limited artistic expression. Nevertheless, many Spanish artists made major contributions throughout the 20th century. Some sought inspiration in the country’s history and folk traditions; others joined the most modern currents in their fields. Music

Spain’s contributions to world culture are many, but none has been so universally well-accepted as its musical heritage, especially that of music performed on stringed instruments. Noteworthy Spanish composers include Fernando Sor (1778–1839), Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, Manuel de Falla, and Joaquín Rodrigo, all of whom drew heavily on popular and regional music for their inspiration. In the hands of Spanish composers, the guitar moved from Rom (Gypsy) folk instrument to a staple of symphonies; from Spain have come such masters as Manitas de Plata, Andrés Segovia, Paco de Lucia, and countless flamenco and classical artists of great distinction. The flamenco tradition, derived from a marriage of Arabic and Spanish folk songs, carried over into southern Spain’s unique “Rock Andaluz” movement of the 1970s and ’80s, centred in Sevilla. In the 1990s Ibiza, a popular holiday destination in the Balearic Islands, emerged as a global capital of electronic music. Electronic artists and disc jockeys from around the world converge on the island each summer to perform at night clubs and private parties, and music-related tourism has become a vital part of Ibiza’s economy.

Spain is also well represented in classical opera, with Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, Alfredo Kraus, and Montserrat Caballé among the most renowned singers. The leading classical instrumentalists of the century were cellist Pablo Casals, pianist Alicia de Larrocha, and guitarist Narciso Yepes. Literature

Spain’s loss of its empire in Latin America following the Spanish-American War (1898) provided the impetus for many Spanish writers, poets, and scholars to restore a sense of national pride. In their work, writers such as José Ortega y Gasset, Pío Baroja, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and Antonio Machado y Ruiz examined Spain’s heritage and its role in the modern world. They and others who took up similar concerns came to be known as the Generation of ’98. These writers helped revitalize Spanish letters and opened the doors for Spanish cultural development in the 20th century.

Many of Spain’s 20th-century authors achieved international recognition, including five who won the Nobel Prize for Literature: dramatists José Echegaray (1904) and Jacinto Benavente (1922), poets Juan Ramón Jiménez (1956) and Vicente Aleixandre (1977), and novelist Camilo José Cela (1989).

The most famous writer of the century, however, was poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. Executed by the Nationalists in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, he became a symbol of art perishing at the hands of fascism. García Lorca’s poetry is often couched in illusive symbolism and, like his plays, draws heavily on the folklore of his native Andalusia and especially on that of the Roma (Gypsies), or Gitanos. The suppression of instinct by social convention and the repression of women are the major themes of his plays (perhaps influenced by his own homosexuality), some of which continue to be produced and which inspired two films by Spanish director Carlos Saura in the 1980s.

Among the leading poets of the last half of the 20th century were Leopoldo Panero, Luis Rosales, Blas de Otero, Gabriel Celaya, Juan Luis Panero, Andrés Trapiello, Claudio Rodríguez, José Hierro, and Pedro Gimferrer, who wrote in Catalan as well as in Castilian. Prominent women poets in the late 20th and early 21st centuries included María Victoria Atencia, known for her poetry inspired by domestic situations, for her cultivation of the themes of art, music, and painting, and for her later existentialist contemplations; Pureza Canelo, known especially for her ecological poetry and feminist volumes; Juana Castro; Clara Janés; and Ana Rossetti, noteworthy for her erotic verse. Contemporary Spanish poetry often uses colloquial language and explores intimate and social themes.

During the early 20th century many novelists experimented with form and technique and put less emphasis on plot and character. In the post-Civil War period a new generation of novelists, including Rosa Chacel, Miguel Delibes, and Carmen Laforet, avoided such experimentation and returned to a more traditional approach. Several noted writers, including Camilo José Cela, Luis Martín-Santos, and Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, focused on postwar social problems.

The late 20th-century novel showed a variety of trends. One was the use of everyday language to tell realistic stories, often based on historical events. At the other extreme were highly intellectual novels by writers such as Juan Benet Goitia and his small group of followers. In addition, some novelists, such as Terenci Moix and, later in his career, Juan Goytisolo, were strongly drawn to non-Western cultures. Among the ranks of leading novelists were Eduardo Mendoza, Carmen Martín Gaite, José Luis Sampedro, Francisco Umbral, Javier Marías, Juan José Millàs, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Antonio Gala. The detective novel became a popular genre after the 1970s, largely through the influence of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán; the work of his younger contemporary Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who writes both intellectual thrillers and historical novels, has been widely translated.

For further discussion, see Spanish literature. Theatre

Spain has been an important centre of world theatre since the Roman era, when playwrights such as Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a native of Córdoba, produced popular and enduring works that would exert great influence in the 16th and 17th centuries—the so-called Golden Age. Whereas medieval drama tended to be closely tied to the Roman Catholic Church, focusing on miracle and Passion plays and on religious themes, the pioneering 16th-century dramatist Juan del Encina helped revive classical theatrical forms. During this profoundly inventive period, a national theatre emerged, fuelled by the energies of artists such as Lope de Vega, Guillén de Castro, Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Miguel de Cervantes.

A time of relative quiet and cultural conservatism followed, as Spanish theatre became a shadow of the French—an irony, given that Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière borrowed many themes and characters from Spanish Golden Age originals. To further the irony, it was a French dramatist and stage director, Juan de Grimaldi, who helped revive the Spanish theatre in the 1820s by both translating French plays into Spanish and commissioning new works by Spanish writers. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, playwrights José Echegaray, Gregorio Martínez Sierra, and Jacinto Benavente helped elaborate this identifiably Spanish theatre, which would arguably reach its zenith in the work of Federico García Lorca. Although, as with other aspects of art and culture, the long Franco era discouraged theatrical experimentation, García Lorca’s work informed that of playwrights such as Antonio Buero Vallejo, Antonio Gala, Adolfo Marsillach, Josep María Flotats, and Fernando Fernán Gómez. These and other writers have produced a significant body of theatrical work in Spanish as well as in other national and regional languages, such as Catalan and Basque. Most modern playwrights are active as well in other literary genres and media, such as poetry and filmmaking. Visual arts

Spain’s most important 20th-century painters and sculptors were all part of the international avant-garde. The most famous, Pablo Picasso, is considered by many to be the most influential European artist of the 20th century. Other leading figures were Juan Gris, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí. Among sculptors, the best-known figure internationally was Eduardo Chillida. Among the leading artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries were the painters Antoni Tàpies, Miguel Barceló, Rafael Canogar, Manuel Millares, and Antonio Saura, along with the sculptors Pablo Serrano, Julio González, Pablo Gargallo, and Alberto Sánchez. Architecture

Antoni Gaudí was the most famous Spanish architect as well as one of the most unusual architects of the early 20th century. Through an eclectic approach, he created a unique style reminiscent of the Mudéjar, an architectural style blending Muslim and Christian design. Despite Gaudí’s posthumous prominence, during his life he had no influence outside of Spain and little influence within it. Most of Gaudí’s work was done in Barcelona. His most famous building is the unfinished Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family. Spain’s leading architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—some of whom attained international renown—included Josep Lluís Sert, Eduardo Torroja, Sanz de Oiza, Ricardo Bofill, José Rafael Moneo, and Santiago Calatrava.

Gaudí, AntoniAntoni Gaudí's Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family (Sagrada Família), Barcelona, Spain.raiwa/iStock/Getty Images Plus Cinema

Spain’s film industry has always been small and economically fragile. A large number of the films shown in Spanish cinemas in the 21st century were imported, from other European countries and, above all, from the United States.

The Spanish film director Luis Buñuel is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Because he was in exile during the Franco regime, most of his films were made outside of Spain, first in Mexico and then in France.

The cinema suffered greatly from the censorship of the Franco regime, and it began to recover only at the end of the 1950s with the work of Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga. After 1970 a number of Spanish directors, such as Carlos Saura, Pilar Miró, Victor Erice, and Pedro Almodóvar, achieved critical success both in Spain and abroad. José Luis Garcí’s Begin the Beguine (1982) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, as did Fernando Trueba’s Belle Epoque (1992). However, Spanish films were not generally economically successful abroad, the one major exception being Almodóvar’s comedies, especially Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), and All About My Mother (1999), the last of which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film. By the late 1990s a new generation of directors, benefiting from government tax incentives and increased exposure on the international film festival circuit, had begun to attract attention outside Spain. In the first years of the 21st century, intellectually ambitious ghost stories such as Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) emerged as a genre that easily found audiences outside the country. Amenábar’s The Sea Inside (2004) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Cultural institutions Museums

Foremost among Spain’s many art museums is the Prado Museum in Madrid, which began construction at the end of the 18th century and was completed in the early 19th century. Many of its paintings came from royal collections of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Prado also has an annex housing 19th- and early 20th-century art.

Other outstanding museums in Madrid include the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, the Joaquín Sorolla Museum, and the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum. The Queen Sofía Museum, which opened in the early 1980s and is dedicated to modern and contemporary art, houses Picasso’s famous mural Guernica, named for the Basque town bombed in 1937 by the fascists. Important museums outside the capital include the Picasso Museum and the Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona, the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid, the El Greco Museum in Toledo, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca.

There are a large number of special-interest museums. Some of them are national institutions, such as the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid and the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, but many more are provincial or local institutions. There are also numerous museums attached to cathedrals and other religious institutions. Libraries and archives

Spain has some 6,500 public and private libraries. Some important ones, such as the libraries of the palatial royal monastery of El Escorial near Madrid and of the University of Salamanca, date back more than four centuries. Others are more recent, notably the National Library in Madrid, which was created in the 19th century.

Spain has a vast number of public and private archives of various sorts: local, provincial, regional, and national. The most important are the National Historical Archive in Madrid, the General Archive of the Administration in Alcalá de Henares, the Archive of the Civil War in Salamanca, the General Archives of Simancas (established in 1540), and the Royal Archives of Aragon in Barcelona. Perhaps the most important for people outside Spain is Sevilla’s Archives of the Indies, which hold an immense quantity of documentation about Spain’s former empire in the Americas. Academies and institutes

Spain’s oldest and most famous academy is the Royal Spanish Academy. Founded in 1713 under Philip V, the first Bourbon king, it was modeled on the French Academy in Paris. Its most important task is to “cultivate and set standards for the purity and elegance of the Castilian language”; since 1951 it has done this in cooperation with similar scholarly institutions in Latin American countries to promote the lexicographical corpus of Spanish in the world. As part of this work, it publishes a massive dictionary intended to be the definitive work of its kind for the language.

There are a number of other cultural and intellectual academies and institutes, most of which date from the 18th and the 19th centuries. These include the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Royal Academy of History, and the Royal National Academy of Medicine. The most prestigious institution for research is the Council for Scientific Research (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; CSIC), an autonomous public research organization based in Madrid and affiliated with the government Ministry of Education and Science. It was created in 1940 by the Franco regime to promote and manage research. Today there are branches of the CSIC throughout Spain, with the largest number of research centres being located in Madrid.

In its attempt to put itself at the centre of the international Spanish-language cultural world, Spain awards the Cervantes Prize, comparable to the Nobel Prize for Literature for all authors writing in Spanish. Among the recipients have been many of the leading Latin American writers. An agency for international cooperation maintains economic and cultural ties with the countries of Latin America and other countries with cultural links to Spain.

One of the most interesting cultural initiatives was the creation in 1991 of the Cervantes Institute. This government agency, modeled on the British Council and the German Goethe Institute, is responsible for promoting the study of Spanish language and culture abroad. In the early 21st century, the Cervantes Institute operated in more than 60 cities in some 30 countries throughout the world. Sports and recreation

Sports play an important part in the daily life of the Spanish people, and each region has its favourite forms of play. In mountainous Catalonia, skiing and other winter sports are popular; along the Valencia coast, windsurfing, scuba diving, and surfing have countless enthusiasts; in the Basque provinces, jai alai (a kind of racquetball) is a favourite pastime; and in Asturias and Andalusia, equestrian events draw large numbers of spectators and participants alike.

Despite the international controversy over bullfighting, the corrida de toros (“running of bulls”) is still fairly popular in Spain. A staple of Spanish culture dating back to antiquity, bullfighting is considered the national spectacle, a rich pageant more akin to a beautifully choreographed ballet than a sporting event. It is seen as a heroic, albeit bloody, test of wills involving courage, intelligence, grace, and elegance. Spain’s foremost matadors have been national heroes of mythic stature, as Manolete was in the 1940s. The season runs from March to October, with bullfights typically occurring on Sunday afternoons in major cities and in almost every town during local festivals. The mecca of bullfighting in Spain is in Madrid, at the Las Ventas bullring.

Juli, El; bullfightingSpanish matador El Juli engaging a bull, June 6, 2010, Barcelona.© Natursports/Shutterstock.com

Spain’s National Olympic Committee was founded and recognized in 1924. The 1992 Summer Olympic Games were held in Barcelona, where Spanish athletes earned 13 gold medals, including for football (soccer), swimming, running, and walking. Spaniard Juan António Samaranch served as president of the International Olympic Committee from 1980 to 2001.

Football was introduced into Spain by the British at the end of the 19th century (British miners established the first Spanish football club, Recreativo, in Huelva in 1889), and a professional league was set up in the 1920s. By the 1950s football had surpassed bullfighting in popularity. Spain’s leading clubs have a distinguished record in European competitions; indeed, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are two of football’s most famous organizations. The Spanish men’s national team won the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) European championship in 1964 but then was long saddled with a reputation for failing to win “big” international matches. Spectacularly reversing its fortunes, Spain won the 2008 UEFA championship, the 2010 World Cup, and another UEFA championship in 2012 with a team that some characterized as the greatest national team in the sport’s history.

At the end of the 1980s, football was challenged by basketball, whose popularity soared after Spain won the silver medal in the sport at the 1984 Olympics. In the early 21st century, a pair of Spanish brothers, Pau and Marc Gasol, became stars in the National Basketball Association. Other popular spectator sports include hockey on roller skates, motorcycle racing, and tennis. Cycling also has a large following, and Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain was a multiple winner of the Tour de France.

Historically, the country has had a fairly poor record in protecting its natural resources, including Spain’s rare wetlands Doñana National Park, from industrial development; despite this, Spaniards are avid users of their country’s many parks and picturesque countryside. Media and publishing The press

At the beginning of the 21st century, Spain had nearly 200 daily newspapers. By far the most widely read, and the most influential, is the liberal El País, published in Madrid and in other important cities and regions. ABC and El Mundo are also leading dailies. Published continuously in Barcelona since 1881, the conservative La Vanguardia" class="md-crosslink">La Vanguardia has the widest Castilian-language readership in Catalonia. The leading regional daily newspapers are El Periódico in Catalonia, La Voz de Galicia in Galicia, and El Correo Español–El Pueblo Vasco in the Basque Country, all published in Castilian. There are other newspapers serving regional and local interests that are published in local languages. There are also several newspapers that specialize in areas such as sports and business. Marca, a sport daily, is the most widely disseminated daily newspaper in Spain. By the late 1990s most leading newspapers also published digital versions on the Internet. Yet, despite this large number of newspapers, overall readership in Spain is low by European standards. By the early 21st century, Spaniards read about two-thirds fewer newspapers than did the average reader in the EU, and most Spaniards got their news from nonprint sources.

There also are many weekly and monthly magazines published in Spain. The most popular and successful are those, such as ¡Hola!, that deal largely in gossip about the lives of celebrities, both national and international. On the other hand, there are also a number of serious political magazines. In general, the boom in publishing that occurred in the aftermath of Franco’s death had receded by the early 21st century. Television and radio

Television was introduced into Spain in 1956. During the Franco regime and the first few years of the constitutional monarchy, there were only two television stations, both part of the government-owned and -controlled Radio-Televisión Española (RTVE). They still broadcast today, solely in Castilian, and have been split into separate organizations: Radio Nacional de España (RNE) and Televisión Española (TVE). Radio Exterior de España (REE) provides overseas services, broadcasting in 10 languages.

In 1983 the Catalan and Basque autonomous governments established television stations that broadcast in the regional languages; a Galician-language station began operation two years later. At the end of the 1980s, the number of television stations available to Spaniards increased rapidly. Moreover, in 1989 the government introduced legislation permitting the establishment of privately owned television stations. Three of these began to broadcast in 1990, and in subsequent years several others began operations. There are now several hundred television stations serving national, regional, and local audiences. At the same time, the availability of satellite dishes, which many Spaniards acquired, gave them access to channels broadcasting in a variety of languages, especially English, French, German, and Italian.

The most popular types of programs include game shows, soap operas, sports, movies, and dramatic series. Much of the programming comes from the United States, but a number of soap operas (telenovelas) from South America are very popular.

Radio broadcasting began on a small scale in the 1920s. A government station, Radio Nacional de España (RNE), was set up by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, but the government never established the same kind of monopoly over radio that it held over television. The number of privately owned radio stations increased markedly during the 1980s and ’90s, such that there were more private than public stations in the early 21st century. Adrian Shubert Vicente Rodriguez The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica History Pre-Roman Spain Prehistory

Human fossils in Spain belong to modern humans (Homo sapiens), the Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis), and even earlier members of the human lineage, possibly H. erectus or H. heidelbergensis. A large number of bones have been recovered from caves at Atapuerca, Burgos, which come from sediments that are at least 300,000 years old. Other important sites are at Torralba and Ambrona (Soria), where elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were trapped accidentally in marshy ground and their remains scavenged. From those sites were excavated shouldered points fashioned from young elephant tusks as well as hundreds of stone implements (hand axes, cleavers, and scrapers on flakes, made from chalcedony, quartzite, quartz, and even limestone) and wooden objects. Pieces of charcoal show that fire was known and used. But H. erectus or H. heidelbergensis humans were already living in Spain as early as 1.2 million years ago, as indicated by finds at Atapuerca and by stone tools recovered from beaches in the Algarve (Mirouço), Huelva (Punta Umbria), and Cádiz (Algeciras) and the terraces of the lower Guadalquivir, Tagus, Manzanares, and Ter rivers. Choppers, angular balls, and flakes from the terraces of the Jabalón River (Ciudad Real) are older than 700,000 years and perhaps more than 1,000,000 years.

AtapuercaCave in Atapuerca, northern Spain.byj2000

Fossils of Neanderthals were found at Bañolas (Girona) and Cova Negra (Valencia). Fully developed Neanderthals, some represented by well-preserved skulls, come from more than 10 different localities throughout Spain, including Los Casares, Carigüela, Gabasa, and Zafarraya, with a cluster in Gibraltar (Forbes’ Quarry, Gorham’s Cave, and La Genista).

The appearance of modern humans (H. sapiens) in Spain after 35,000 bce opened a new era, during which material culture acquired an innovating velocity it never lost. Flint tools became more varied and smaller, and bone and antler were used for harpoons, spears, and ornaments. Needles from El Pendo Cave (Cantabria) hint at sewn clothing of furs and skins. Most remarkable were the intellectual achievements, culminating in the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) caves found in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain. Those caves were painted, engraved, and sculpted and visited intermittently between 25,000 and 10,000 bce. On the walls and ceilings are images of cold-weather animals—such as bison, mammoths, Przewalski’s horse, aurochs (wild oxen), and woolly rhinoceroses. Predators such as bears, wolverines, and lions are rarely represented, and depictions of humans are extremely scarce. Many caves (such as the group of caves at El Castillo, Cantabria) show rows of coloured dots, arrowlike marks, negative impressions of human hands, and signs interpreted as vulvas. Animals may be drawn skillfully in black outlines, like the horses at Ekain (Guipúzcoa), or painted in polychrome, as at Altamira (Cantabria), and in bichrome, as at Tito Bustillo (Asturias). Those are scenes and standard compositions, but figures are also drawn singly (Puente Viesgo, Cantabria), engraved repeatedly, or drawn on top of other representations. Although the main animals hunted for food were red deer, ibex (mountain goat), and reindeer, the most-common depictions are of aurochs, bison, and horses. Salmon, a seasonal food, was rarely drawn, and plants never appear. Similar themes occur on portable objects made of bone and antlers and on stone plaques. At the habitation site of the cave of Parpalló (Valencia), thousands of engraved stone plaques accumulated; although their interpretation is difficult, it should be stressed that Paleolithic art follows conventions. Figures are placed formally within selected caves (probably sanctuaries), with meanings hidden from modern eyes. Paleolithic visitors left stone lamps and pine firebrands as well as footprints and hand marks on muddy surfaces in the French caves of Fontanet, Isturitz (Haristoi), and Lascaux. The complexity of the Paleolithic mental universe is demonstrated by the mortuary practice in two graves in the Cueva Morín (Cantabria), where four mutilated burials survived as casts formed by a compact greasy sediment that had replaced the bodies. The dead were accompanied by meat offerings and ochre and buried below low mounds, on top of which ritual fires burned.

Cave painting of a bison, Altamira, Spain.© Juan Aunion/Shutterstock.com

After 10,000 bce the climatic changes accompanying the end of the last glaciation led to the disappearance of cold-tolerant game and the flooding of their grazing lands near the coasts. Hunters responded by widening their range of food and collecting quantities of marine shellfish. Such adaptations can be seen in caves as far apart as Santimamiñe (Guipúzcoa), Costalena (Zaragoza [Saragossa]), and Dos Aguas (Valencia). More than 7,500 figures painted by those hunters and gatherers are known from all over the eastern and southern Iberian Peninsula, dating from 7000 to 3500 bce and giving tantalizing glimpses of their society. Located in the open air, usually beneath rock overhangs or in protecting hollows, are animated representations of people dancing (two women in voluminous skirts at Dos Aguas; three women in skirts and two nude ithyphallic men at the Barranco del Pajarejo, Albarracín), fighting, robbing honey, stalking red deer, and hunting wild goats. Some scenes are constructed around a narrative. The Remigia Cave and the series of 10 cavities with outstanding paintings at the Cingle de La Gasulla (Castellón) next to it show scenes of remarkable activities; in cavity IX two matched groups of archers, led by a man sporting a headdress, are engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and nearby in the rock shelter of Les Dogues another combat pits two bands of archers rhythmically against each other at close range. Bees are depicted more than 200 times, often near hives, and in cavity IV of the Cingle de la Ermita del Barranc Fondo (La Valltorta, Castellón), a scene shows a long fibre ladder with men climbing it to reach a hive defended by oversized bees. Other well-preserved groups of paintings are found at Minateda and Alpera (Albacete) and around Bicorp (Valencia).

The craft of pottery making and the cultivation of domestic cereals and livestock that characterize the Neolithic (New Stone Age) economy in Europe reached Spain from the central Mediterranean, and perhaps from northwestern Africa, after 6000 bce. Although agriculture and husbandry were known early in eastern and southern Spain, they were assimilated extremely slowly and irregularly. Caves and sites conveniently located for hunting, such as those around Montserrat (Barcelona) and at La Sarsa (Valencia) and Carigüela (Granada), were still preferred, and people lived in extended families or small bands. A different pattern prevailed in southwestern Spain and Portugal, where the advent of the Neolithic Period came later, between 4500 and 3800 bce. By 4000 bce the first big collective tombs were being built from boulders, and by 3500 bce funerary monuments were prominent in the landscapes of Alentejo (Portugal), Extremadura, and the Atlantic littoral. Veritable megalithic cemeteries arose around Pavia and Reguengos de Monsaraz (Alentejo).

Significant changes in technology and social organization occurred after 3200 bce. Skills in copper working were accompanied by a tendency to live in larger village communities. Differences in natural resources and population density meant that regions developed unequally, and centres of innovation are known all around the southern and southwestern coasts of Spain and Portugal. Particularly impressive is the settlement at Los Millares (Almería), which extends over five acres (two hectares) and is protected by triple walls of stone reinforced with towers at regular intervals. A formidable barbican with arrow slits and guard chambers projected from the gateway. Those defenses stretch over 330 yards (300 metres) and cut off a triangle of land high above the Andarax River, with a cemetery of more than 70 collective tombs lying just outside the walls. On the nearby hills, 10 or 15 smaller citadels watched over the natural approaches to the village. Modest dwellings lay inside, and an especially large building was used as a workshop to melt copper and to cast objects in simple molds; the metal wastes and crucibles show that pure copper and copper mixed with a small amount of arsenic as a hardening agent were regularly selected. Mines and copper-smelting slags of this date are known from the Alhamilla highlands, less than 12 miles (20 km) to the east. Smaller, undefended villages are known from El Barranquete and Almizaraque (Almería). The agricultural economy was based on growing wheat and barley, raising common domestic animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, and probably tilling small areas of river bottomland, the only land plentifully watered in that arid region. Varied grave goods such as copper implements, personal ornaments, and decorated vessels for drinking and feasting (called bell beakers from their distinctive shape) indicate a stratified tribal society at Los Millares with marked inequality of riches and access to the good things in life. The defenses and multiple forts suggest social instability and the raiding and fighting that went with it. Similar villages and their megalithic tombs are known in the western outskirts of Sevilla (Seville), eastward at the Cabezo del Plomo (Murcia), and at Vila Nova de São Pedro and Zambujal north of Lisbon (Portugal).

Many Copper Age villages had been abandoned by 2000 bce, and Bronze Age settlement shifted to new sites, sometimes only a few hundred yards away. Steep hilltops were favoured for their inaccessibility, and in southeastern Spain the custom of burying people below the floors of their houses replaced the collective practices of the Copper Age societies. Social stratification is very marked at settlement sites such as El Argar and El Oficio (Almería), where the richest women were adorned with silver diadems while their male consorts were equipped with bronze swords, axes, and polished pottery. At Fuente-Álamo (Almería) the elite lived apart from the village, in square stone houses with round granaries and a water cistern nearby. Such customs were practiced with less intensity on the southern Meseta, where fortified hamlets known as motillas dominated a flat landscape. In eastern and northern Spain people did not live in villages at all but lived in hamlets such as Moncín (Zaragoza) or on isolated family farms such as El Castillo (Frías de Albarracín, Teruel). In the wetter regions of Spain and Portugal, along the Atlantic coast and the Bay of Biscay, so-called castros—small settlements fortified with a deep ditch and inner bank—arose, with a flourishing bronze industry linked to southern Britain and France and a custom of burying hoards of metal tools and weapons. Mining for copper ores was practiced at El Milagro and Aramo (Asturias), where the last miners abandoned their antler picks and levers deep in the underground galleries. Such differences in settlement patterns and customs indicate that Bronze Age Spain was not homogeneous but a social mosaic that included centralized tribal societies as well as looser associations based on smaller units. Such Bronze Age societies were prospering when Phoenician sailors reached Spain about 800 bce. Phoenicians

Venerable historical traditions recount the Phoenician voyages to found new cities. Utica, on the Tunisian coast of North Africa, was reputedly founded in 1178 bce, and by 1100 bce the Phoenician city of Tyre supposedly had a Spanish colony at Gadir (Cádiz). Although intriguing, such historical traditions are unsupported by evidence. Excavations confirm that the Phoenicians settled in southern Spain after 800 bce, shortly after the traditional founding of the greatest Phoenician colony, Carthage (now in Tunisia). Their search for new commodities led them ever farther westward and was the reason for their interest in southern Spain’s mineral wealth. The untapped lodes of silver and alluvial deposits of tin and gold provided essential raw materials with which to meet the increasing Assyrian demands for tribute. By 700 bce silver exported from the Río Tinto mines had become so abundant that it depressed the value of silver bullion in the Assyrian world. That is the background for Phoenician interest in the far west.

Phoenician commerce was conducted by family firms of shipowners and manufacturers who had their base in Tyre or Byblos and placed their representatives abroad. That accounts for the rich tombs of Phoenician pattern found at Almuñécar, Trayamar, and Villaricos, equipped with metropolitan goods such as alabaster wine jars, imported Greek pottery, and delicate gold jewelry. Maritime bases from the Balearic Islands to Cádiz on the Atlantic were set up to sustain commerce in salted fish, dyes, and textiles. Early Phoenician settlements are known from Morro de Mezquitilla, Toscanos, and Guadalhorce and shrines from Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar and the Temple of Melqart on the island of Sancti Petri near Cádiz. After the fall of Tyre to the Babylonians in 573 bce and the subjugation of Phoenicia, the early prosperity faded until the 4th century. Many colonies survived, however, and Abdera (Adra), Baria (Villaricos), Carmona (Carmo), Gadir (Cádiz), Malaca (Málaga), and Sexi (Almuñécar) thrived under the trading system established by Carthage for the central and western Mediterranean. Eivissa (Ibiza) became a major Carthaginian colony, and the island produced dye, salt, fish sauce, and wool. A shrine with offerings to the goddess Tanit was established in the cave at Es Cuyram, and the Balearic Islands entered Eivissa’s commercial orbit after 400 bce. In 237 bce, shortly after its defeat in the First Punic War, Carthage launched its conquest of southern Spain under Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father, and founded a new capital at Cartago Nova (Cartagena) in 228 bce. After the death of Hamilcar, Hannibal continued Carthaginian expansion in Spain, reaching the Ebro River—the limit imposed by Rome in the settlement of the First Punic War. A diplomatic dispute over Seguntum, a Roman ally in Carthaginian Spain, led to the outbreak of the Second Punic War in 218 bce. Despite Hannibal’s invasion of Italy and near victory there, Carthage suffered a crushing defeat in Spain in 206 bce at the hands of Publius Cornelius Scipio (Scipio Africanus the Elder) and ultimately lost the war. Greeks

Greeks from Phocaea reached Spain’s shores, but by 575 bce they had established only two small colonies as offshoots of Massilia (Marseille) in the extreme northeast, at Emporion (Ampurias) and Rhode (Rosas). There was, however, an older Archaic Greek commerce in olive oil, perfumes, fine pottery, bronze jugs, armour, and figurines carried past the Strait of Gibraltar by the Phoenicians. It developed between 800 and 550 bce, peaking sharply from 600 to 550, and was directed along the southern coast in precisely the areas of most-intense Phoenician influence and settlement.

Connected with that early commerce in the late 7th century are the stories collected by Herodotus about the kingdom of Tartessos (Tartessus) and its ruler, King Arganthonios, who befriended the Greek captain Kolaios after his vessel was blown off course. Tartessos was portrayed as a mineral emporium where Kolaios exchanged his merchandise for a fortune in silver bullion. The Greeks remembered that kingdom as a legendary world beyond their reach. Tartessos, in fact, was the late Bronze Age society in southwestern Spain that included the mines of the Tinto River in its territory; it flourished between 800 and 550 bce.

After 450 bce there was renewed Greek interest in Spain, although directed to the eastern peninsula rather than to the west and south. Greek objects were widely traded by Carthaginian middlemen, as the shipwreck at El Sec (Palma de Mallorca) suggests. The vessel sank with a mixed cargo that included millstones, ingots, and decorated Greek pottery, some scratched with personal Punic names such as “Slave of Melqart” (MLQRT’BD) or “Baal Is Merciful” (B’HLM). Iberians

The indigenous Bronze Age societies reacted vigorously to the culture of the Phoenicians and then the Greeks, adopting eastern Mediterranean values and technologies. At first the process of assimilation was exclusive, affecting few people; then it gathered pace and volume, drawing entire societies into the transformation. Everywhere the process of change was rapid and intense, lasting a few generations between 700 and 550 bce. As old patterns of patronage were overturned with the arrival of new prestige goods outside the control of the former rulers, new adventurers came onto the scene. Their traces can be seen in rich tombs around Carmona at cemeteries such as El Acebuchal and Setefilla and in Huelva at the cemetery of La Joya. Princely wealth from La Joya included a chariot of walnut wood, an ivory casket with silver hinges, bronze mirrors, tiered incense burners, and ornate libation jugs. Gold jewelry is known from many spectacular treasures in southern Spain, of which the regalia from El Carambolo (Sevilla) and the mixture of jewels, engraved scarabs, and tableware of silver and glass from Aliseda (Cáceres) are good examples. Glass and ivory were imported, but the impressive goldwork of filigree and granulation was probably western Phoenician craftsmanship.

By 550 bce a distinctive Iberian culture can be recognized throughout the entire south and east of the peninsula. The name Iberian was the one used by Classical writers, although it referred to a culture having an ethnic and linguistic diversity that remained politically distinctive until its incorporation into the Roman Empire. Iberian civilization had an urban base, and indigenous cities arose after 600 bce, imitating aspects of the Phoenician and Greek colonies. They were especially large and numerous in western Andalusia (Andalucía), at Ategua, Cástulo, Ibros, Osuna, Tejada la Vieja, and Torreparedones, and, somewhat later, also at the other end of the Iberian world, in northeastern Spain at Calaceite (Teruel), Olérdola, Tivissa (Tarragona), and Ullastret (Girona). Cities were political centres with territories; whereas some joined into confederacies, others were independent city-states. The urban heartland in western Andalusia prospered uninterruptedly from 550 bce, but many towns in southern and eastern Spain were destroyed in the middle of the 4th century amid political turbulence attributed to Carthaginian influence.

The economy continued to be based on agriculture, though supplemented with cultivated grapes and olives of eastern origin. Ironworking was introduced by the Phoenicians, and iron was available everywhere for basic agricultural tools by 400 bce; forging inlaid and damascened weapons brought the blacksmiths’ art to a peak. The fast potter’s wheel allowed mass production of crockery and storage vessels. There were many regional centres of production, and the artistic repertoire grew from geometric designs in the early stages to complex figurative compositions after 300 bce. Important centres arose at Archena, Elx (Elche), Liria, and Azaila, whose artisans depicted scenes from Iberian myth and legend. Mining for silver continued at the Tinto River, expanding up the Guadalquivir valley to the area around Cástulo and to the coast around Cartagena. The scale of extraction at the Tinto River was enormous, and the Phoenician and Iberian workings built up more than six million tons of silver slag. Silver was abundant in Iberian society and was widely used for tableware among the upper class. An outstanding treasure from Tivissa has dishes engraved with religious themes.

Figurative stone sculpture shows Greek influence in the sophisticated modeling of human forms—especially in the friezes from Porcuna—and of animals. Sculptures of deer, griffins, horses, and lions were used as emblems to decorate tombs and were either placed on top of freestanding columns, as at Monforte de Cid, or displayed on tiered monuments. There are sphinxes from Agost and Salobral and a tower tomb from Pozo Moro (Albacete), built by 500 bce, which is decorated with bas reliefs of the Lord of the Underworld in a style reminiscent of 8th-century sculpture from northern Syria. Temples at the Cerro de los Santos (Albacete) and Cigarralejo (Murcia) yielded hundreds of stone human and horse figurines, respectively, whereas bronze was favoured for statuettes at the sanctuary of Despeñaperros (Jaén). Striking funerary sculptures of enthroned ladies, bejeweled and robed, from Elx and Baza represent the Carthaginian goddess Astarte; the throne had a side cavity to receive cremations.

Three native writing systems developed in Iberia. An alphabet derived from Phoenician signs was being used in the southwest by 650 bce, and alphabets based on Greek models arose in the southeast and in Catalonia after 425 bce. Many inscriptions exist, including letters inscribed on rolled-up lead sheets found in houses at Mogente (Valencia) and Ullastret, but they cannot be read. Only the names of places and some personal names can be recognized. The Iberian writing systems remained in use until the Roman conquest. Celts

Inland Spain followed a different course. To the west and north developed a world that has been described as Celtic. Iron was known from 700 bce, and agricultural and herding economies were practiced by people who lived in small villages or, in the northwest, in fortified compounds called castros. The people spoke Indo-European languages (Celtic and Lusitanian) but were divided culturally and politically into dozens of independent tribes and territories; they left behind hundreds of place-names. Celts, living on the central mesetas in direct contact with the Iberians, adopted many Iberian cultural fashions, including wheel-made pottery, rough stone sculptures of pigs and bulls, and the eastern Iberian alphabet (inscriptions on coins and on the bronze plaque from Botorrita [Zaragoza]), but they did not organize themselves into urban settlements until the 2nd century bce. Metalworking flourished, and distinctive neck rings (torques) of silver or gold, along with brooches and bangles, attest to their technical skills. The Mediterranean way of life reached the interior only after the Romans conquered Numantia in 133 bce and Asturias in 19 bce. Richard John Harrison Roman Spain The conquest

The Romans became interested in Spain after the conquest of much of the region by Carthage, which had lost control of Sicily and Sardinia after the First Punic War. A dispute over Saguntum, which Hannibal had seized, led to a second war between Rome and Carthage.

Although the Romans had originally intended to take the war to Spain on their own initiative, they were forced to do so defensively to prevent Carthaginian reinforcements from reaching Hannibal after his rapid invasion of Italy. Roman generals, however, had great success, conquering large sections of Spain before a disastrous defeat in 211 bce forced them back to the Ebro River. In 210 Scipio Africanus resumed Rome’s effort to remove the Carthaginians from Spain, which was achieved following the defeat of the Carthaginian armies at Baecula (Bailén) in 208 and Ilipa (Alcalá del Río, near Sevilla) in 207. Scipio returned to Rome, where he held the consulship in 205, and went on to defeat Hannibal at Zama in northern Africa in 202.

After the expulsion of the Carthaginians from Spain, the Romans controlled only that part of the peninsula that had been affected by the war: the eastern seaboard and the valley of the river Baetis (Guadalquivir). Although over the next 30 years the Romans fought almost continuously—chiefly against Iberian tribes of the northeast, against the Celtiberians in the northeastern Meseta, and against the Lusitanians in the west—there is little sign that this opposition to Roman rule was coordinated, and, although the area under Roman control increased in size, it did so only slowly. The region was divided into the two military areas (provinciae) of Nearer and Further Spain (Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior) in 197, after which elected magistrates (praetors) were sent out, usually for two-year periods, to command the armies; the Romans, however, were more interested in winning victories over Spanish tribes (and so gaining the accolade of a triumph—a ceremonial victory march through the city of Rome) than in establishing any organized administration. After the campaigns of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (father of the famous tribune of the same name) and Lucius Postumius Albinus in 180–178, treaties were arranged with the Celtiberians and probably with other tribes, as a result of which Roman taxation seems to have become more regular.

In the middle of the 2nd century, during a period when Rome was not otherwise occupied by fighting in the eastern Mediterranean or Africa, large-scale wars broke out in Celtiberia in the northern part of the Meseta and in Lusitania, which resulted in a series of consuls (senior magistrates) being sent to Spain. Those struggles continued sporadically for the next two decades, during which Roman armies were defeated on several occasions, notably in 137 when an entire army commanded by the consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus was forced to surrender to the Celtiberians. The war against the Lusitanians was ended only by the assassination of their leader, Viriathus, in 139, and the Celtiberians were finally subdued in 133 by the capture of their main town, Numantia (near modern Soria), after a prolonged siege conducted by Publius Scipio Aemilianus (Scipio Africanus the Younger), the grandson by adoption of Hannibal’s opponent.

In the 1st century bce, Spain was involved in the civil wars afflicting the Roman world. In 82 bce, after Lucius Cornelius Sulla captured Rome from the supporters of Gaius Marius (who had died four years earlier), the Marian governor of Nearer Spain, Quintus Sertorius, relying partly on his good relations with local Spanish communities, successfully frustrated the attempts of two Roman commanders, Quintus Metellus Pius and the young Pompey, to regain control of the peninsula, until Sertorius’s assassination in 72 resulted in the collapse of his cause. During the wars between Julius Caesar and Pompey, Caesar rapidly secured Spain by a victory over the Pompeians at Ilerda (Lleida); but after Pompey’s murder in Egypt in 48, his sons, Gnaeus and Sextus Pompey, raised the south of the peninsula and posed a serious threat until Caesar himself defeated Gnaeus at the Battle of Munda (in present-day Sevilla province) in 45. Not until the reign of Augustus—who, after the defeat of Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31, became master of the entire Roman Empire—was the military conquest of the peninsula complete. The last area, the Cantabrian Mountains in the north, took from 26 to 19 bce to subdue and required the attention of Augustus himself in 26 and 25 and of his best general, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, in 19. It was probably after this that the peninsula was divided into three provinces: Baetica, with its provincial capital at Corduba (Córdoba); Lusitania, with its capital at Emerita Augusta (Mérida); and Tarraconensis (still called Hispania Citerior in inscriptions), based on Tarraco (Tarragona). Romanization

It does not seem that the Romans pursued a policy of deliberate “Romanization” of their Spanish provinces, at least for the first two centuries of their presence there. Scipio left some of his wounded veterans at Italica (Santiponce, near Sevilla) in 206; the Roman Senate allowed a settlement of 4,000 offspring of Roman soldiers and native women to be established at Carteia (near Algeciras) in 171; and further veteran settlements were probably placed at Corduba and Valentia (Valencia) during the 2nd century bce. There had certainly been migration from Italy to the silver-mining areas in the south during that period, and in Catalonia Roman villas, whose owners were producing wine for export, appeared at Baetulo (Badalona) before the end of the 2nd century. It was not until the period of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, however, that full-scale Roman-style foundations (coloniae) were established for the benefit of Roman legionary veterans, some on already-existing native towns (as at Tarraco) and some on sites where there was relatively small-scale habitation previously, as at Emerita Augusta. By the early 1st century ce, there were nine such foundations in Baetica, eight in Tarraconensis, and five in Lusitania. An inscription from one of those colonies, the colonia Genetiva Iulia at Urso (Osuna), which contains material from the time of its foundation under Julius Caesar, shows a community of Roman citizens with their own magistrates and religious officials, a town council, and common land assigned to the town.

During the reign of Augustus and through the period up to the overthrow of the emperor Nero in 68 ce, native communities also began to model themselves on the Roman pattern, setting up public buildings (including a forum, buildings for local government, temples, and bathhouses); some acquired the status of municipium, by which the inhabitants gained the so-called Latin right, which afforded privileges under Roman law and allowed the magistrates of the town to become Roman citizens. That process was advanced rapidly during the reign of the Flavian emperors—Vespasian (69–79 ce), Titus (79–81 ce), and Domitian (81–96 ce). Vespasian is said to have granted the Latin right to all the communities of Spain, and, although that is almost certainly an exaggeration, epigraphic evidence from towns in Baetica (especially a long inscription on six bronze tablets from Irni [near Algámitas, Sevilla] unearthed in 1981) reveals the existence of a general charter for those Latin municipia issued in the reign of Domitian, requiring them to adopt the forms of Roman law and to organize themselves on lines not unlike those used by the coloniae of Roman citizens. It is likely that this particular interest in Spain resulted from the support given by Spanish communities to Servius Sulpicius Galba, who, while governor of Tarraconensis in 68 ce, had participated in the uprising against Nero and had been emperor for a few months in 68–69.

The extent to which the upper classes in the towns and cities of Spain, of both immigrant and native stock, were part of the elite of the Roman Empire as a whole in the 1st century ce can be seen by the appearance of men of Spanish origin in the life of Rome itself. Those include the philosopher and writer Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 bce–65 ce) from Corduba, who was the tutor and subsequent adviser to Nero, and the poet Martial (c. 38–c. 103 ce), born at Bilbilis (near Calatayud)—a municipium since the time of Augustus—who was active in Rome under the Flavian emperors. A growing number of Roman senators were natives of Spain, including Trajan and Hadrian, who later became emperors (98–117 and 117–138 ce, respectively); both came from Italica.

The same period saw a progressive reduction in the number of Roman troops stationed in the peninsula. During the Cantabrian War under Augustus the number of legions rose to seven or eight, but those were reduced to three by the reign of his successor, Tiberius, and to one by the time of Galba’s accession. From Vespasian’s time to the end of the empire, the legionary force in Spain was limited to the VII Gemina Felix legion, stationed at Legio (León) in the north. Both that legion and the other auxiliary units in Spain seem to have been recruited increasingly from the peninsula itself, and recruits from Spain served throughout the Roman world, from Britain to Syria. From the time of Vespasian onward, military activity in Spain itself was restricted in scope and occasional, such as the repulsion of an attack by the Mauri (probably Imazighen [Berbers]) from Africa in the 170s and raids by barbarians during the chaotic period of the later 3rd century, which, according to some late sources, involved the sack of Tarraco. It seems probable that the legion VII Gemina was split in the late 3rd or 4th century, with one part being transferred to the comitatenses, the mobile army that accompanied the emperor. Certainly the remaining forces in Spain, further reduced by the removal of soldiers to fight in the civil war that followed the attempt by the usurper Constantine to seize power from the emperor Honorius in 406, were unable to provide much resistance to the Vandals, Suebi, and Alani, who swept across the Pyrenees in 409. Administration

From the time of Augustus, the work of the provincial governors, who under the Roman Republic had been commanders in military areas, became more focused on the administration of their provinces. Baetica, the most thoroughly pacified of the three Augustan provinces, was governed by a proconsul chosen by the Senate in Rome, whereas Tarraconensis and Lusitania had governors appointed directly by the emperor (legati Augusti). Those provincial divisions continued to be used down to the time of the emperor Diocletian (284–305 ce), who subdivided Tarraconensis into three sections—Gallaecia, Tarraconensis, and Carthaginiensis. In Baetica financial matters were handled by another magistrate (quaestor), as had been the case under the republic, whereas in Augustus’s provinces that work was done by imperial agents (procuratores Augusti). The administration of law, which had always been the responsibility of the provincial commanders, was undertaken at a number of centres, each of which had a district (conventus) attached to it: in Baetica those were Corduba, which was the provincial capital, Astigi (Ecija), Gades (Cádiz), and Hispalis (Sevilla); in Tarraconensis, Tarraco itself, Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza), Nova Carthago (Cartagena), Clunia (Peñalba de Castro), Asturica (Astorga), Lucus Augusti (Lugo), and Bracara Augusta (Braga); and, in Lusitania, Scallabis (Santarém), Pax Iulia (Beja), and the provincial capital, Emerita Augusta. The larger number in Tarraconensis, the result of the larger geographic size of that province, led to the appointment of an additional official (the legatus iuridicus) to help with the work, at least from the time of the emperor Tiberius (14–37 ce) onward. The extent to which the governor was regarded as the source of law in the province can be seen from the requirement set forth in the charters issued to municipia that local magistrates should post, at the place where they dispensed justice, a copy of the governor’s edict specifying which categories of legal suits he was prepared to hear.

Economy

The economy of Roman Spain, as throughout the ancient world, was primarily agricultural. In addition to the food grown for local consumption, there was a considerable export trade in agricultural products, which has been demonstrated by the investigation of shipwrecks and amphorae found in Spain and elsewhere in the Roman world. Particularly important are the amphorae from Monte Testaccio, a hill in Rome, still some 160 feet (50 metres) high, that is composed mostly of the remains of amphorae in which olive oil had been carried from Baetica to Rome in the first three centuries ce. Wine from Baetica and Tarraconensis, even though not highly regarded in Rome, was shipped in quantity from the 1st century bce to the mid-2nd century ce. Spain also was famous for the production of piquant fish sauces, made especially from tuna and mackerel, of which the most reknowned was garum. Glass, fine pottery, and esparto grass (for making ropes and baskets) were also exported from Spain. Mining was another highly important economic activity; Spain was one of the most-important mining centres in the Roman world. Religion

Religion in Spain was shaped by the spread of Roman control. Along the eastern coast and in the Baetis valley, the anthropomorphic deities of the Romans absorbed or replaced earlier nonanthropomorphic gods, particularly in the Romanized towns and cities. In areas of Greek and Phoenician colonization, local gods were readily identified with Roman ones, the most-striking example being the cult of Hercules/Melqart at Gades. In the north and west, native deities survived longer. In the imperial period the worship of the emperor was widespread, especially in the provincial capitals, where it provided a focus for expressions of loyalty to the emperor, and priesthoods in the imperial cult were an important part of the careers of local dignitaries. Mystery religions from the eastern Mediterranean appeared in the 1st and 2nd centuries ce, particularly that of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Christianity became established in the 2nd century, and the extent of its organization is attested not only by accounts of martyrdoms during the 3rd century but also by the records of one of the earliest councils at Elvira, about 306. It is noteworthy that Hosius (Ossius; c. 257–357), bishop of Corduba, acted as religious adviser to the emperor Constantine after his conversion in 312. Roman remains

Monumental remains of the Roman occupation can be seen throughout Spain, of which some of the most remarkable are the city walls of Tarragona and Lugo, the aqueducts at Segovia, Mérida, and Tarragona, the reservoir, theatre, and public buildings at Mérida, the bridges at Alcántara and Córdoba, and the towns of Italica and Ampurias (Emporion). Particularly fine collections of Roman art and remains can be seen in the National Archaeological Museums in Madrid and Tarragona and the provincial archaeological museums in Mérida, Sevilla, Zaragoza, and Barcelona, as well as in Conimbriga (in Portugal). John S. Richardson Visigothic Spain to c. 500

Roman rule in Spain, and elsewhere in the Western Empire, was undermined during the 5th century by the migrations of Germanic tribes that had settled along the Roman frontier and that came under pressure from expansion by the Huns. One such group, subsequently known as the Visigoths, a people that lived along the Danube River and converted to Arian Christianity, was authorized by the emperor Valens to settle in the empire in 376. Mistreatment by local officials and the failue of the empire to uphold its end of the bargain caused the Goths to revolt. In the subsequent Battle of Adrianople in 378, Valens was killed and his armies were destroyed by the Goths. Despite the extent of their victory, the Goths came to terms with the emperor Theodosius I and settled in the empire as foederati (“federated allies”). Theodosius’s heirs, however, were less successful at containing the various Germanic peoples that had moved into the empire. In 406 the Ostrogoths attempted to invade Italy, and the efforts to stop them allowed the Vandals, Alans, and Suebi (Suevi) to enter Gaul and then Spain. After ravaging the country for two years, the Suebi and the Asding Vandals settled in the northwestern province of Galicia (Gallaecia). The Siling Vandals occupied Baetica in the south, and the Alans, an Iranian people, settled in the central provinces of Lusitania and Carthaginiensis. For the time being, only Tarraconensis remained entirely under Roman control.

The Visigoths also posed difficulties for Theosodius’s heirs. The new king, Alaric, rose in rebellion soon after the death of the emperor in 395 but was kept in check by the general Stilicho. Rome’s failure to make concessions to Alaric and the massacre of barbarian soldiers in the imperial army following Stilicho’s execution in 408 led to Alaric’s invasion of Italy and sack of Rome in 410, which sent shock waves throughout the empire. Alaric died soon after, however, and was succeeded by Athaulf, who moved into southern Gaul. Failing to win recognition for his people as foederati, or allies, of the empire, he was forced into Tarraconensis, where he was assassinated in 415. Under his successor, Wallia (415–418), the Romans acknowledged the Visigoths as allies and encouraged them to campaign against the other barbarian tribes in the peninsula. Those Alans and Siling Vandals who survived Visigothic attacks sought refuge with the Asdings and the Suebi in Galicia. In 418 the Roman emperor Honorius authorized the Visigoths to settle in Gaul in the provinces of Aquitania Secunda and Narbonensis.

The Suebi and the Asding Vandals meanwhile continued to lay waste to Spain. Led by King Gaiseric (Genseric), the Vandals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into North Africa in 429. They subjugated that province and governed it and the Balearic Islands until the Byzantine reconquest in 534. In Spain the Suebi, initially pagans, accepted Arianism, but in the middle of the 6th century they were converted to Roman Catholic Christianity by St. Martin of Dumio, bishop of Braga. Their independent kingdom in Galicia survived until the Visigoths subdued it in 585.

The Visigoths, as allies of Rome, aided in the defense of Gaul against Attila and the Huns. However, the unchecked deterioration of the Western Empire resulted in the rupture of the fragile alliance between Rome and the Visigoths. Under the rulership of Euric (466–484), the Visigoths founded an independent kingdom in southern Gaul, centred at Toulouse. In Spain the Visigoths drove the Suebi back into Galicia and occupied Tarraconensis and part of Lusitania. For the moment the provinces of Baetica and Carthaginiensis were left to take care of themselves.

Despite the collapse of imperial rule in Spain, Roman influence remained strong. The majority of the population, probably about six million, were Hispano-Romans, as compared with 200,000 barbarians. Hispano-Romans held many administrative positions and continued to be governed by Roman law embodied in the Theodosian Code. The Codex Euricianus (“Code of Euric”), which was completed in 475 or 483 or under Euric’s son a generation later, was written in Latin and designed as the personal law of the Visigoths. It also addressed relations between Euric’s Roman and Visigothic subjects. In 506 Euric’s son Alaric II (484–507) published a legal code, known as the Breviarium Alariciarum (“Breviary of Alaric”) or the Lex Romana Visigothorum (“Roman Law of the Visigoths”), which was based on the Theodosian Code and meant to serve the needs of the Roman population.

Visigothic dominance over southern Gaul came to an end when Clovis I and the Franks defeated Alaric II at Vouillé in 507. As a consequence of Frankish expansion, the Visigoths were compelled to penetrate more deeply into Spain, where their kings eventually established themselves at Toledo (Toletum). Meanwhile, as part of his effort to reconquer the Western Empire, the Byzantine emperor Justinian took advantage of struggles among the barbarians to regain control of the southern and eastern coasts of Spain. For about 70 years the Byzantines maintained a foothold in that part of the peninsula.

Although the Visigoths had been in contact with the Roman world for more than a century before their effective settlement in Spain and had acquired a veneer of Romanization, significant legal, cultural, social, and religious differences kept them apart from the Hispano-Roman population. Aside from different languages and disparities in education, these diverse peoples were subject to distinct bodies of law. Although the Visigoths were Christian, they held to the Arian heresy against the Roman Catholic Christianity of the Hispano-Romans. The Visigothic king was theoretically ruler of only his own people, whereas the Hispano-Romans continued to profess allegiance to a rapidly vanishing imperial authority. A Roman law that prohibited intermarriage between the two peoples was, however, abolished in the late 6th century. Still, the task of bringing the two peoples together and of achieving some sort of political and cultural unity was a formidable one. The Visigothic kingdom

The Hispano-Roman population did not easily absorb the Visigoths. Because the Suebi maintained an independent kingdom in Galicia and the Basques steadfastly opposed all attempts at subjugation, the Visigoths did not control the entire peninsula. To the great satisfaction of the Hispano-Romans, Byzantine authority was restored in the southeast early in the 6th century. However, in the second half of the century Leovigild (568–586), the most effective of the Visigothic monarchs, advanced the unification of the peninsula by conquering the Suebi and subduing the Basques. Ruling from Toledo in the centre of the peninsula, he transformed Visigothic kingship by adopting the throne and other Roman symbols of monarchy. A committed Arian Christian, Leovigild sought to unify the kingdom by encouraging conversion of the Catholic Hispano-Roman population to his faith. Despite his efforts to bring the Arian faith more in line with Catholic teaching and his emphasis on conversion rather than compulsion, Leovigild’s attempt was ultimately unsuccessful and may have contributed to the failed revolt of his son Hermenegild (later St. Hermenegild), who had accepted Roman Catholicism and hoped, perhaps, to become king. Hermenegild’s rebellion, however, may have been incidental to his conversion, and Leovigild’s policy of uniting this people through religion would be vindicated by his other son, Reccared.

Recognizing that the majority of the people adhered to the Catholic faith, Reccared (586–601) repudiated his father’s religion and announced his conversion to Catholicism. As the Gothic nobles and bishops followed his lead, a principal obstacle to the assimilation of Visigoths and Hispano-Romans was lifted. Thereafter, the Hispano-Romans, no longer expecting deliverance by Byzantium, developed a firm allegiance to the Visigothic monarchy. As a consequence, Swinthila (621–631) was able to conquer the remaining Byzantine fortresses in the peninsula and to extend Visigothic authority throughout Spain.

Not only was the conversion of the Visigoths a sign of the predominance of Hispano-Roman civilization, but it also brought the bishops into a close relationship with the monarchy. Indeed, both Hermenegild and Reccared had close ties with St. Leander of Sevilla, who was involved with their conversions and was the brother of the encyclopaedist Isidore. Kings, imitating Byzantine practice, exercised the right to appoint bishops, the natural leaders of the Hispano-Roman majority, and to summon them to the Councils of Toledo. Although the Councils of Toledo were essentially ecclesiastical assemblies, they had an exceptional impact on the government of the realm. The bishops, once they had heard a royal statement concerning current issues, enacted canons relating to church affairs, but they also touched on secular problems, such as royal elections or cases of treason. Through their councils the bishops provided essential support for the monarchy, but, in striving to achieve a peaceful and harmonious public order, the bishops sometimes compromised their independence.

The hostility of the nobility to hereditary succession and an absence of natural heirs tended to preserve the elective character of the monarchy. Because the Visigoths had a reputation for assassinating their kings, the bishops tried to safeguard the ruler by means of an anointment ceremony. The holy oil manifested to all that the king was under God’s protection and now had a sacred character. The bishops, hoping to eliminate the violence associated with a royal election, also devised the procedures to be followed. The royal household (officium palatinum), which imitated the Roman imperial model, assisted the king in governing, but when necessary the king also consulted assemblies of magnates and notables (aula regia). Dukes, counts, or judges were responsible for the administration of provinces and other territorial districts surviving from Roman times. Self-government had long since disappeared in the towns. Agriculture and animal husbandry were the mainstays of the economy. Evidence suggests that commercial and industrial activity were minimal.

The predominance of the law of the Hispano-Roman majority over that of the Visigoths was another manifestation of the ascendancy of Roman civilization. The form and content of the Liber Judiciorum, a code of law promulgated about 654 by the Visigothic king Recceswinth (649–672), was fundamentally Roman. Although Germanic elements (such as the test of innocence by the ordeal of cold water) were included, the code consistently accepted the principles of Roman law, and, unlike Germanic customary law, it was meant to have territorial rather than personal application. The Liber Judiciorum was a principal part of the Visigothic legacy received by medieval Spain.

The extraordinary cultural achievements of the 7th century also testify to the continuing impact of the Roman heritage. The most prolific author was St. Isidore, bishop of Sevilla (Hispalis) from about 600 to 636, a friend and counselor of kings. In addition to his history of the Visigoths and theological treatises, his chief contribution to medieval civilization was the Etymologiae (Etymologies), an encyclopaedic work that attempted to summarize the wisdom of the ancient world.

Toward the end of the 7th century, a critical time in Visigothic history began. The deposition, through deception, of King Wamba (672–680), a capable ruler who tried to reform the military organization, was a portent of future problems. As agitation continued, Wamba’s successors made scapegoats of the Jews, compelling them to accept the Christian religion and threatening them with slavery. After the death of Witiza (700–710), the persistent turbulence of the nobility thwarted the succession of his son and allowed Roderick, duke of Baetica (710–711), to claim the throne. Determined to oust Roderick, Witiza’s family apparently summoned the Muslims in North Africa to their aid. Subsequently, Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, the Muslim governor of Tangier, landed at Calpe (Gibraltar) in 711 and routed King Roderick and the Visigoths near the Guadalete River on July 19. The triumphant Muslims rapidly overran Spain, meeting only feeble resistance from the leaderless Visigoths. Although the kingdom of the Visigoths vanished, its memory inspired the kings of Asturias-León-Castile to begin the reconquest of Spain. Christian Spain from the Muslim invasion to about 1260

Despite ongoing warfare among its various Christian kingdoms, a recurring theme in Christian Spain from the Islamic invasion of the 8th century to the coming of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, in the late 15th century was the unification of the Iberian Peninsula under Christian rule. The Islamic conquest disrupted whatever measure of unity the Visigoths had achieved and raised new religious, cultural, legal, linguistic, and ethnic barriers to assimilation with the native population. A number of tiny Christian states eventually rose from obscurity in the northern mountains and, prompted by self-preservation and religio-cultural hostility toward Islam, initiated the Reconquista (Reconquest). Christian success was in direct proportion to the strength of Islamic Spain at any given time. When Islamic power waned, the Christians usually advanced their frontiers. The kings of Asturias-León-Castile, declaring themselves the heirs of the Visigoths, claimed hegemony over the entire peninsula. However, the rulers of Portugal, Navarre (Navarra), and Aragon-Catalonia (Spanish: Cataluña; Catalan: Catalunya), whose frontiers began to be delineated in the 11th and 12th centuries, repudiated and often undermined the aspirations of their larger neighbour. The Reconquista was nearly completed by the middle of the 13th century, by which time the Muslims retained only the small kingdom of Granada (Arabic: Gharnāṭah) in vassalage to Castile until 1492.

The Trastámara dynasty, which came to power in Castile in the late 14th century, gave a new impetus to the search for peninsular unity by using marriage, diplomacy, and war to acquire dominion over the neighbouring Christian kingdoms. At the same time, the Trastámaras struggled to extend royal power against the resistance of the nobles. Ferdinand and Isabella linked Aragon and Castile by marriage and also brought the Reconquista to a conclusion by conquering Granada. However, as they were unable to incorporate Portugal into a family union by marriage, the unification of the peninsula was incomplete. The political union of Castile and Aragon could not by itself, of course, overcome the two realms’ centuries-old diversity of languages, laws, and traditions. The Christian states, 711–1035

Soon after the Islamic invasion, fleeing Visigothic nobles and the mountaineers of Asturias united under the leadership of Pelayo (718–737), a Gothic lord, in opposition to the Muslim forces. Later generations acclaimed Pelayo’s victory over the Muslims at Covadonga, about 718, as the beginning of the Reconquista and the “salvation of Spain.” Alfonso I (739–757) expanded the Asturian kingdom by occupying Galicia after the withdrawal of rebellious Imazighen garrisoned there. He also created an uninhabited no-man’s-land between Christian and Islamic Spain by devastating the Duero River valley to the south. The Basques apparently recovered their independence in the western Pyrenees, while the Franks drove the Muslims from Septimania (southwestern France) and moved into northeastern Spain. Although Charlemagne failed to take Zaragoza (Saraqusṭah) in 778, his troops captured Barcelona in 801 and occupied Catalonia. This region, later known as the Spanish March, consisted of several counties under Frankish rule and long maintained strong political and cultural connections first to the Carolingian empire and then to the kingdom of France. Thus, for several centuries Catalans looked to the north.

By contrast, the Asturians turned to the south. After advancing his chief seat to Oviedo, Alfonso II (791–842) attempted to recreate Visigothic institutions. In the late 9th century Alfonso III (866–910) took advantage of internal dissension in Islamic Spain to plunder enemy territory and to seize notable strongholds such as Porto. He also initiated the repopulation of the lands reaching southward to the Duero that had been deserted for about a century. His construction of numerous castles to defend his eastern frontier against Muslim assaults gave that area its distinctive character and thus its name, Castile. During this time the earliest known Christian chronicles of the Reconquista were written, and they deliberately tried to demonstrate the historical connection between the Visigothic and Asturian monarchies. Portraying themselves as the legitimate heirs of Visigothic authority and tradition, the Asturians self-consciously declared their responsibility for the Reconquista of Islamic Spain.

However, Asturian leadership did not go unchallenged: King Sancho I Garcés (905–926) began to forge a strong Basque kingdom with its centre at Pamplona in Navarre, and Count Wilfred of Barcelona (873–898)—whose descendants were to govern Catalonia until the 15th century—asserted his independence from the Franks by extending his rule over several small Catalan counties.

The apparent weakness of Islamic Spain and the growth of the Asturian kingdom encouraged García I (910–914) to transfer the seat of his power from Oviedo southward to the city of León. Nevertheless, any expectation that Islamic rule was set to end was premature. During the 10th century the caliphs of Cordóba (Qurṭabah) not only restored order and unity in Islamic Spain but also renewed their raids on the Christian north. Although the Christians suffered great destruction, they occasionally won some victories. The triumph of Ramiro II (931–951) over the great caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III at Simancas in 939 was extraordinary, but within his own dominions Ramiro encountered increasing hostility from the Castilians. As a frontier people hardened by exposure to the dangers of daily Islamic raids, they were disinclined to bow to Leonese tradition and law. Fernán González (c. 930–970), the count of Castile, defied Ramiro and established the foundations for the later independence of Castile.

With Islamic power steadily increasing in the later 10th century, the Christians suffered a corresponding decline. When ambassadors representing Ramiro III of León (966–984), Sancho II Garcés of Navarre (970–994), Count Borrell II of Barcelona (c. 940–992), and García Fernández, count of Castile (970–995), pledged homage and paid tribute to the caliph at Cordóba, the abject status of the Christian rulers was manifest for all to see. Yet, despite their acknowledgement of Islamic hegemony, the Leonese kings, adhering to Asturian custom, continued to assert their rights as heirs to the Visigothic tradition. Their claim to domination over the entire peninsula was now expressed in the idea of a Hispanic empire centred at León. As the century drew to a close, the imperial idea surely offered some comfort when Abū ʿĀmir al-Manṣūr (Almanzor), who exercised dictatorial authority in the caliph’s name, regularly ravaged all the Christian states. His semiannual plundering expeditions in the north not only brought many slaves to Cordóba but also helped to divert the Muslims from his usurpation of power. After defeating Count Borrell in 985, he burned Barcelona and three years later plundered León; in 997 he sacked the great Christian shrine of Santiago de Compostela. However, with the death of al-Manṣūr, the caliphate of Cordóba disintegrated.

The demise of Islamic rule allowed the Christian states to breathe easily again. The ensuing civil wars among the Muslims enabled Ramon Borrell, count of Barcelona (992–1018), to avenge past affronts by sacking Cordóba in 1010. Alfonso V of León (999–1028) exploited the situation to restore his kingdom and to enact the first general laws for his realm in a council held at León in 1017. Once the threat of Islam seemed to be removed, the Christian rulers resumed old quarrels. Sancho III Garcés (the Great), king of Navarre (1000–35), was able to establish an undisputed ascendancy in Christian Spain for some years. As communication with the lands of northern Christendom increased, French influence grew ever stronger. French pilgrims trod the newly developing route to Compostela; monastic life was reformed according to the Cluniac observance; and various northern social ideas and customs altered the life of the nobility. Already in control of the counties of Aragon, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza, and including Count Berenguer Ramon I of Barcelona (1018–35) among his vassals, Sancho III continued his aggrandizement by overrunning the county of Castile and challenging Bermudo III of León (1028–37). Sancho completed his triumph by seizing the city of León and taking the title of emperor in 1034, but his death the next year brought an end to the unity he had achieved. The medieval empire, 1035–1157