The history of Spain

Spain occupies most of the Iberian Peninsula, a land bounded by the Pyrenees, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and separated from Africa only by the narrow Strait of Gibraltar. Its long history runs from some of Europe's earliest human remains and its most famous cave art, through Phoenician, Carthaginian and Roman rule, the Visigothic kingdom and nearly eight centuries of Muslim al-Andalus, to the Christian kingdoms that united under the Catholic Monarchs in the late fifteenth century. From 1492 Spain built the first global empire, spanning much of the Americas and reaching Asia, before a long decline, the loss of its American colonies in the nineteenth century, and a twentieth century marked by civil war and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Since 1978 it has been a parliamentary monarchy, a member of the European Union and a highly decentralised state in which questions of regional identity, especially in Catalonia and the Basque Country, remain central.

The caves of the Sierra de Atapuerca, near Burgos, have yielded fossils and tools that are among the oldest evidence of humans in western Europe, dating back more than a million years, and the species Homo antecessor was named from bones found there in the 1990s. Neanderthals later lived across the peninsula, and Iberia, with Gibraltar, was among their last refuges before they vanished around 40,000 years ago. Modern humans painted the caves of the Cantabrian coast, above all Altamira, where the bison of the great ceiling, painted around 14,000 to 18,000 years ago, made it the first cave in which prehistoric painting was recognised, in 1879.

Farming spread to the peninsula from the Mediterranean around 5500 BCE. Communities built megalithic tombs such as the dolmens of Antequera, and Copper Age Los Millares, near Almería, was fortified. The Bronze Age El Argar culture of the south-east, from around 2200 BCE, formed one of the earliest state-like societies of western Europe. In the early first millennium BCE Greek writers described Tartessos, a rich southern kingdom of silver and copper.

In the first millennium BCE the peninsula was home to many peoples. Iberians lived along the Mediterranean coast and in the south, in walled towns, writing their own scripts and carving sculptures such as the Lady of Elche. The Celts and Celtic-speaking peoples dominated the centre, north and west, and in the interior the mixed Celtiberians became famous for their fortified hill towns and iron weapons. The Basques, whose language predates the arrival of Indo-European speech, lived in the western Pyrenees.

Traders from the Levant came for metals. Phoenicians from Tyre founded Gadir, today's Cádiz, by the ninth or eighth century BCE, along with trading posts such as Málaga, linking the peninsula to the Mediterranean network of Phoenicia. Greeks founded Emporion in Catalonia. After Rome defeated Carthage in the First Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca landed at Gadir in 237 BCE and built an empire in southern and eastern Iberia, with its capital at Carthago Nova (Cartagena), founded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal. When Hamilcar's son Hannibal took the Roman ally Saguntum in 219 BCE, he set off the Second Punic War, marching from Iberia over the Alps to Italy.

Rome sent armies to Iberia in 218 BCE to cut Hannibal's supply lines, and by 206 BCE Scipio Africanus had driven the Carthaginians out. The conquest of the rest of the peninsula took two centuries. The Roman Republic faced long wars against the Lusitanians, led by Viriathus until his murder in 139 BCE, and the Celtiberians, whose town of Numantia was starved into surrender in 133 BCE. Hispania was also a battleground in Rome's civil wars, where Julius Caesar defeated the sons of Pompey at Munda in 45 BCE. Only under Augustus, with the Cantabrian Wars that ended in 19 BCE, was the north-west subdued.

Hispania became one of the most Romanised parts of the Roman Empire, divided into the provinces of Baetica, Tarraconensis and Lusitania. Latin replaced most native languages, except Basque. Cities such as Tarraco (Tarragona), Emerita Augusta (Mérida) and Corduba (Córdoba) gained theatres, temples and aqueducts, like the one that still crosses Segovia. Spanish mines supplied much of the empire's silver, gold and lead, and Baetica exported olive oil and wine. Hispania produced emperors and writers: Trajan and Hadrian came from families settled at Italica, near Seville, and Theodosius I from the north-west, while Seneca, Lucan, Martial and Quintilian were born in the peninsula. Christianity spread from the third century, and the Council of Elvira, held around 300 near Granada, is one of the earliest church councils whose decrees survive.

As the Western Roman Empire weakened, the Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Pyrenees in 409. The Visigoths, first sent by Rome to fight them, established a kingdom based at Toulouse, and after the Franks defeated them at Vouillé in 507 they moved their centre into Hispania, eventually making Toledo their capital. The Suebi held Galicia until 585, and the forces of Justinian I seized a strip of the south-east for the Byzantine Empire in 552, holding it until the 620s.

The Visigoths were a small Arian Christian elite ruling a Catholic Hispano-Roman majority. King Reccared converted to Catholicism in 587, and in 589 the Third Council of Toledo proclaimed the kingdom's conversion. Church councils at Toledo became pillars of the monarchy, and Isidore of Seville compiled the Etymologies, an encyclopedia read throughout the medieval West. A single law code, the Liber Iudiciorum of 654, applied to Goths and Romans alike. Yet the elective monarchy was plagued by coups, and from the 610s the kings issued harsh laws against Jews, including forced baptism and enslavement.

In 711 a largely Berber army under Tariq ibn Ziyad, serving the Umayyad Caliphate, crossed from North Africa, apparently drawn in by a Visigothic succession dispute, and killed King Roderic in battle near the Guadalete river. Within a few years almost the whole peninsula was under Muslim rule. Raids into Gaul were checked at the Battle of Tours in 732, and in the mountains of Asturias a Visigothic noble, Pelayo, defeated a Muslim force at Covadonga around 722, founding a small Christian kingdom.

Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus, became one of the great centres of medieval civilisation. When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads in 750, the Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman I escaped to Iberia and in 756 founded an independent emirate at Córdoba, where his dynasty built the Great Mosque. In 929 Abd al-Rahman III proclaimed himself caliph, and under him and his son al-Hakam II Córdoba was among the largest and richest cities in Europe, with a famous library, while the palace city of Madinat al-Zahra rose outside it. Muslims, Christians and Jews lived under Islamic law, with Christians and Jews tolerated as protected but subordinate communities; many Christians adopted Arabic language and culture, and conversion to Islam gradually made Muslims the majority. Irrigation spread new crops such as rice, citrus and sugar cane. The chamberlain al-Mansur, known in Christian sources as Almanzor, led dozens of campaigns against the northern kingdoms and sacked Santiago de Compostela in 997.

After al-Mansur's family lost power, civil war destroyed the caliphate between 1009 and 1031, and al-Andalus fragmented into rival taifa kingdoms such as Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza and Granada, rich in culture but militarily weak. When Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo in 1085, the taifa kings called in the Almoravids, a Berber dynasty from Morocco, who defeated him in 1086 and took over al-Andalus; in the twelfth century they were replaced by the Almohads. These centuries produced some of the leading thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age, among them the philosopher Averroes of Córdoba, while Jewish poets and scholars, including Maimonides, born in Córdoba around 1138, made Iberia a centre of Jewish learning. The Almohads' intolerance drove Maimonides and many others into exile.

The northern kingdoms grew slowly. Asturias became the kingdom of León; Castile, at first a frontier county of León, became a kingdom in the eleventh century; Navarre rose around Pamplona; and Aragon and the counties of Catalonia, which had begun as a Frankish march set up by Charlemagne's successors, were united in 1137 when the count of Barcelona married the heiress of Aragon, creating the Crown of Aragon. Portugal broke away from León in the twelfth century. The tomb of the apostle James, said to have been discovered at Santiago de Compostela in the ninth century, drew pilgrims from all Christendom.

The long process of Christian expansion southwards, later called the Reconquista, mixed holy war with alliances across religious lines, as the career of the Castilian warlord El Cid, who served both Christian and Muslim rulers and took Valencia in 1094, shows. The decisive victory came at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, when the kings of Castile, Aragon and Navarre defeated the Almohads. Ferdinand III of Castile, which had united permanently with León in 1230, took Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, while James I of Aragon conquered Majorca in 1229 and Valencia in 1238. Only the Nasrid Emirate of Granada survived, as a tributary of Castile, building the Alhambra palace.

The two crowns developed differently. The Crown of Castile, the larger, was a land of great nobles, military orders and sheep-raising, whose king Alfonso X the Wise sponsored translation of Arabic and Hebrew learning and history-writing in Castilian. The Crown of Aragon, a federation of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia with their own laws and parliaments, became a Mediterranean power, gaining Sicily in 1282, Sardinia and later Naples, with Barcelona as its great trading city. The fourteenth century brought the Black Death, civil war in Castile and, in 1391, pogroms against Jews that spread from Seville across the peninsula, killing thousands and leading to mass conversions.

In 1469 Isabella of Castile married Ferdinand of Aragon. Isabella won a war of succession in Castile and Ferdinand inherited Aragon in 1479, uniting the two crowns under one couple, though each kept its own laws and institutions. The Catholic Monarchs, as the pope later titled them, tamed the nobility, and in 1478 they established the Spanish Inquisition to pursue converted Jews, known as conversos, suspected of secretly practising Judaism; thousands were executed over the following decades.

In 1492 three events transformed Spain. On 2 January Granada surrendered after a ten-year war. In March the monarchs ordered all Jews to convert or leave, and tens of thousands went into exile, founding Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean, especially in the Ottoman Empire. And in October Christopher Columbus, sailing for Castile, reached the Caribbean. The Muslims of Granada were promised freedom of religion, but Castile forced them to convert in 1502 and Aragon in the 1520s. Ferdinand annexed most of Navarre in 1512, and by his death in 1516 the political shape of modern Spain was largely set.

Isabella and Ferdinand's grandson Charles I, of the Habsburg dynasty, already ruler of the Netherlands, inherited Spain and its Italian kingdoms in 1516, and in 1519 he gained the Austrian lands and was elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V. Meanwhile the Age of Discovery turned into conquest. Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521, Francisco Pizarro began the conquest of the Inca Empire in 1532, and the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano, first circled the globe in 1522.

The Spanish Empire governed its American lands through viceroyalties such as New Spain and Peru, and silver from Potosí and Zacatecas flowed to Seville, financing Spain's wars. For the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, conquest was a catastrophe: epidemics of smallpox and other diseases carried in the Columbian Exchange, together with war, forced labour under the encomienda and mita systems and social collapse, reduced their numbers by most estimates by tens of millions within a century. Some Spaniards protested, notably the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, and the New Laws of 1542 tried to limit abuses, but forced labour continued, and Spain also took part in the Atlantic slave trade that brought enslaved Africans to its colonies. In 1571 Spain founded Manila in the Philippines, linking America and China by the annual galleons across the Pacific.

Philip II, who reigned from 1556 to 1598, made Madrid his capital in 1561 and built the monastery-palace of El Escorial. He led a Catholic alliance to victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571 and in 1580 inherited Portugal and its empire, but he faced revolt in the Netherlands from 1568, which led to the independence of the Dutch Republic, and the failure of his Armada against the England of Elizabeth I in 1588. Despite American silver the crown repeatedly defaulted on its debts. Yet the period from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century was Spain's Golden Age in culture: the mystics Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, the theologians of the School of Salamanca, the painters El Greco, Velázquez and Murillo, the playwrights Lope de Vega and Calderón, and Miguel de Cervantes, whose Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and 1615.

Under Philip III, between 1609 and 1614, about 300,000 Moriscos, the descendants of converted Muslims, were expelled. Spain's involvement in the Thirty Years' War and its rivalry with France brought revolts in 1640 in Catalonia and Portugal, which regained its independence. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 recognised the Dutch, and the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 ceded Roussillon to the France of Louis XIV. The reign of the sickly Charles II, the last Spanish Habsburg, saw further decline.

Charles II died childless in 1700, leaving his crown to Louis XIV's grandson Philip of Anjou. The resulting War of the Spanish Succession was both a European war and a Spanish civil war, in which most of the Crown of Aragon backed the Habsburg claimant. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 confirmed Philip V as king but stripped Spain of its Italian and Netherlands possessions and gave Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain. Barcelona fell after a long siege on 11 September 1714, now Catalonia's national day, and Philip's Nueva Planta decrees abolished the separate institutions of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, creating a more centralised state on the French model; only Navarre and the Basque provinces kept their charters.

The Bourbon kings reformed administration, the army and the navy and revived the economy. Charles III, who reigned from 1759 to 1788, was an enlightened reformer who expelled the Jesuits, encouraged trade and rebuilt Madrid. Spain backed the American Revolution against Britain, and its American empire reached its greatest extent. But after the French Revolution it fell into dependence on France, and in 1805 the Spanish fleet was destroyed with the French at Trafalgar.

In 1808 Napoleon forced Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII to abdicate at Bayonne and made his brother Joseph king. Madrid rose on 2 May, the beginning of the Peninsular War, in which Spanish armies and guerrilla bands, with British and Portuguese forces under Wellington, fought the French until 1814, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Spanish lives, a war depicted by Francisco de Goya. In besieged Cádiz a parliament adopted in 1812 a liberal constitution, one of the most influential of its time. But when Ferdinand VII returned in 1814 he abolished it, and in the Spanish American wars of independence, led by figures such as Simón Bolívar, Spain lost its mainland American empire by the mid-1820s, keeping only Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

The rest of the century was turbulent. Liberals and absolutists fought over the constitution, and after Ferdinand's death in 1833 his brother Carlos challenged the succession of his daughter Isabella II, beginning the Carlist Wars, fought mainly in the Basque Country, Navarre and Catalonia. Generals repeatedly intervened in politics. The revolution of 1868 drove Isabella into exile; an Italian prince, Amadeo of Savoy, reigned briefly, and the First Republic of 1873 and 1874 collapsed in months. The restored Bourbon monarchy of Alfonso XII from 1874 brought stability through a system in which two parties alternated in power by arranged elections. Industry grew in Catalonia and the Basque Country, giving rise to Catalan and Basque nationalism and to strong anarchist and socialist movements. In 1898 war with the United States cost Spain Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, a disaster that prompted the soul-searching of the writers called the Generation of '98.

Spain stayed neutral in the First World War, but strikes, Catalan demands and a costly colonial war in Morocco, where Spanish forces suffered a catastrophic defeat at Annual in 1921, destabilised the monarchy. General Miguel Primo de Rivera ruled as dictator from 1923 to 1930 with the king's consent. After republican parties won the main cities in municipal elections, Alfonso XIII left the country and the Second Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931. Its governments gave women the vote, separated church and state, granted Catalonia autonomy and began land reform, but they faced resistance from the church, landowners and the army and the impatience of anarchists and socialists. A right-wing government suppressed a revolutionary uprising of miners in Asturias in 1934, and after the left-wing Popular Front won the elections of February 1936, political violence escalated.

On 17 and 18 July 1936 army officers launched a coup. It failed in Madrid, Barcelona and much of the country, and the result was civil war. The rebels, or Nationalists, soon led by General Francisco Franco, were helped by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, while the Republic received aid from the Soviet Union and volunteers of the International Brigades; Britain and France stayed out. The German Condor Legion's bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 was immortalised by Pablo Picasso. Both sides killed civilians behind their lines: in the Republican zone tens of thousands of suspected right-wingers, priests and nuns were murdered, especially in 1936, while the Nationalists carried out a systematic campaign of executions on a larger scale. Franco's forces took Barcelona in January 1939 and Madrid in March, and he declared victory on 1 April 1939. Estimates of the war's dead range widely, from around 300,000 upwards, and about half a million people fled into exile, many to France and Mexico.

Franco ruled as head of state until his death, at the head of a single party, the Falange, backed by the army and the Catholic Church. Tens of thousands of Republicans were executed after the war and hundreds of thousands imprisoned or held in camps, while Catalan and Basque were suppressed in public life. Although sympathetic to the Axis, Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War, apart from a volunteer Blue Division sent to fight the Soviet Union. Isolated after 1945, with years of hunger, the regime was rescued by the Cold War: a 1953 agreement allowed American bases in Spain, and the country joined the United Nations in 1955.

From 1959 economic liberalisation, foreign investment, mass tourism and emigration to northern Europe produced a rapid boom, and millions of Spaniards moved from the countryside to the cities. Society changed faster than the regime, and strikes, student protests and the armed Basque separatist group ETA, founded in 1959, which killed Franco's prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973, challenged it. Franco named Juan Carlos, grandson of Alfonso XIII, as his successor. As Franco lay dying in 1975, Spain withdrew from its colony of Western Sahara, leaving it to Morocco and Mauritania. Franco died on 20 November 1975.

Juan Carlos I appointed Adolfo Suárez prime minister in 1976, and with the consent of the Francoist parliament Suárez dismantled the dictatorship. Political parties, including the Communists, were legalised, free elections were held in June 1977, an amnesty law covered political crimes on all sides, and a new constitution, approved by referendum on 6 December 1978, made Spain a parliamentary monarchy. It created a "State of the Autonomies", with seventeen autonomous communities, and Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia regained self-government. An attempted military coup on 23 February 1981, when civil guards held parliament at gunpoint, failed after the king spoke against it on television.

The Socialists under Felipe González governed from 1982 to 1996, modernising the welfare state and confirming membership of NATO, which Spain had joined in 1982, in a referendum in 1986, the same year it joined the European Community. ETA's campaign continued, killing more than 800 people in total before it declared a permanent ceasefire in 2011 and dissolved in 2018. Under the conservative José María Aznar, from 1996 to 2004, Spain adopted the euro and enjoyed a construction boom. On 11 March 2004 Islamist terrorists bombed commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people, three days before an election won by the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who legalised same-sex marriage in 2005.

The bursting of the property bubble in 2008 plunged Spain into a deep recession, with unemployment peaking at 27 per cent in 2013, and the anti-austerity protests of 2011 gave rise to new parties. Juan Carlos, damaged by scandals, abdicated in 2014 in favour of his son Felipe VI. In Catalonia, support for independence grew, and on 1 October 2017 the regional government held a referendum that the Constitutional Court had suspended, amid police efforts to stop the vote. The Catalan parliament declared independence on 27 October; the central government imposed direct rule, and several leaders were later imprisoned for sedition while others, including the regional president Carles Puigdemont, left the country. The Socialist Pedro Sánchez became prime minister in 2018 after a vote of no confidence over corruption in the People's Party, pardoned the jailed Catalan leaders in 2021 and, in return for Catalan support for his re-election after the 2023 election, passed a contested amnesty law in 2024.

Spain continued to debate its past: Franco's remains were removed from his monumental tomb outside Madrid in 2019, and a Democratic Memory Law of 2022 promoted the search for victims of the civil war and dictatorship. Recent years have brought catastrophic floods around Valencia in October 2024, a power blackout across the Iberian Peninsula in April 2025, and in January 2026 the collision of two high-speed trains near Adamuz, in Córdoba province, which killed 43 people. Amid protests over housing costs and the defeat of his housing measures in parliament, Sánchez called a snap general election for 29 November 2026. Spain has nearly 50 million people and four official regional languages alongside Castilian Spanish, a reflection of the separate kingdoms that united to form it.