A Brief History of Spain: Caves, Caliphs, Empire, and the Long Road to Democracy

Companion pieces: in the Spanish track, España: Historia Condensada, Al-Ándalus y la Herencia Árabe en el Español, 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos and Si Hubiera Nacido en España (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way). In this series, A Brief History of France follows.

At about twenty past six on the evening of 23 February 1981, a lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard named Antonio Tejero walked into Spain's Congress of Deputies with a pistol in his hand and about two hundred armed guards behind him. The deputies were in the middle of voting on a new prime minister. Tejero climbed to the speaker's platform and shouted at everyone to stay still. His men fired into the ceiling. Almost every deputy dived under the benches.

Three men did not. The outgoing prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, stayed in his seat. The deputy prime minister, an elderly general called Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, stood up and ordered the guards to stand down, and was nearly wrestled to the floor. The Communist leader, Santiago Carrillo, sat smoking. In Valencia, tanks rolled into the streets. For a long night, a country that had buried its dictator only five years earlier did not know whether it still had a democracy.

It did. Shortly after one in the morning, King Juan Carlos appeared on television in the uniform of captain general of the armed forces and ordered the army to obey the constitution. By the next day the coup had collapsed.

To see why that night mattered so much, and why Spaniards are still arguing in 2026 about the dictatorship, the civil war before it, and even about what to call events of the eighth century, you need the whole story. This is it, told at length.

In this history

1. Before Spain: caves, Iberians, Celts and traders (to 218 BC)
2. Hispania: Rome and the Visigoths (218 BC–711)
3. Al-Andalus: the emirate and the caliphate of Córdoba (711–1031)
4. Taifas, frontiers and the "Reconquista" debate (1031–1479)
5. The Catholic Monarchs and 1492 (1469–1516)
6. Empire and Golden Age: the Habsburgs (1516–1700)
7. Bourbons, Napoleon and the Constitution of Cádiz (1700–1833)
8. A century of civil wars and pronunciamientos (1833–1931)
9. The Second Republic and the Civil War (1931–1939)
10. Franco's Spain (1939–1975)
11. The Transition and the new democracy (1975–2008)
12. Crisis, Catalonia and Spain in 2026 (2008–2026)
13. How to understand Spain today

Part 1 — Before Spain: caves, Iberians, Celts and traders (to 218 BC)

Spain covers most of the Iberian Peninsula, about 85 percent of it, with Portugal holding the rest. Its heart is the Meseta, a high, dry plateau averaging about 660 metres above sea level, ringed and crossed by mountain chains. Keep that map in mind. It explains a great deal: why the peninsula's regions have so often had their own languages, laws and loyalties; why the coasts looked outward to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic while the interior looked inward; and why whoever held the centre, from Toledo to Madrid, has always had to work hard to hold the edges.

The oldest Europeans

Some of the oldest human remains in Europe come from a low limestone ridge near Burgos, the Sierra de Atapuerca. When railway engineers cut a trench through it in the late nineteenth century, they sliced open caves full of bones. UNESCO, which listed the site in 2000, calls it "the earliest and most abundant evidence of humankind in Europe", covering nearly a million years.

The numbers are staggering. In 2025, researchers published in Nature a partial face from the site called Sima del Elefante, dated to between 1.4 and 1.1 million years ago, the oldest human face yet found in western Europe. At the neighbouring Gran Dolina site, excavators found fossils that, in 1997, they assigned to a new species, Homo antecessor, dated to between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago. In a deep pit called the Sima de los Huesos, the "pit of bones", lie the remains of dozens of individuals who look like early relatives of the Neanderthals.

Atapuerca is not a single discovery but a library of human evolution, still being read: excavation there has run every summer for decades.

The painters of Altamira

Much later, after modern humans reached Iberia, people in the caves of the Cantabrian coast began to paint. The most famous cave is Altamira, near Santillana del Mar. A local man found its entrance in 1868. In 1879 an amateur archaeologist, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, was exploring it when his eight-year-old daughter, María, looked up and saw the ceiling covered in red and black bison.

Sautuola published the find. Many leading experts of the day refused to believe that "primitive" people could have painted so well and suspected a forgery. He died before the scholarly world came round, which it did only after similar art was found in French caves around 1900.

Modern dating has made the cave older still. Uranium-series dating of thin mineral crusts over the paint, published in Science in 2012, showed that a red claviform (club-shaped) sign in Altamira was at least 35,600 years old, and that a red disk in nearby El Castillo was at least 40,800 years old. The great polychrome bison were painted thousands of years later. UNESCO listed Altamira in 1985 and in 2008 added seventeen more painted caves of northern Spain. The real cave is closed to almost all visitors, because human breath was damaging the paintings; a full-size replica stands nearby.

Farmers, metal and the first towns

Farming arrived from the eastern Mediterranean several thousand years later, followed by megalithic tombs and, in the far southeast, some of Europe's earliest fortified towns. At Los Millares, in Almería, people of the Copper Age built a walled settlement with stone houses, ringed by communal tombs, more than four thousand years ago. Iberian metal (copper, silver, tin and later iron) would draw outsiders for the next two thousand years.

Iberians, Celts and the traders from the sea

By the first millennium BC, two broad groups of peoples dominated the peninsula, though neither was a single nation.

Into this world came traders from the eastern Mediterranean. The Phoenicians, from the cities of what is now Lebanon, founded Gadir, today's Cádiz, which ancient writers dated to around 1100 BC; archaeologists have found Phoenician remains there from roughly the ninth century BC onward. Cádiz therefore competes with Lisbon and a few others for the title of oldest continuously inhabited city in western Europe. The Phoenicians wanted silver, and they brought the alphabet, the potter's wheel, new crops and new gods. Greeks from Phocaea, via their colony at Marseille, founded Emporion (Empúries, in Catalonia) in the sixth century BC; its name simply means "market".

Then came Carthage, the Phoenician colony in North Africa that became a great power. After losing the First Punic War to Rome, the Carthaginian Barca family built a new empire in Iberia, founding Carthago Nova, today's Cartagena. From there, in 218 BC, Hannibal set out with his army and his elephants across the Pyrenees and the Alps to invade Italy. Rome's answer was to send an army to Iberia to cut off his base. It landed at Emporion that same year. It would not leave for six centuries.

Part 2 — Hispania: Rome and the Visigoths (218 BC–711)

Two hundred years of conquest

Rome came to Iberia to fight Carthage and stayed to conquer. Publius Cornelius Scipio, the future Africanus, captured Cartagena and drove the Carthaginians out in a series of campaigns between 210 and 206 BC. What followed was the longest conquest in Roman history: about two centuries of on-off war against the peninsula's peoples.

The names of the resisters became Spanish legends. Viriathus, a Lusitanian shepherd turned guerrilla leader, beat Roman armies for years until, in 139 BC, Rome bribed three of his companions to kill him in his sleep. The Celtiberian town of Numantia, near today's Soria, held out against a Roman siege until 133 BC; its people chose to die or burn their town rather than surrender, and "Numantine resistance" is still a Spanish phrase for holding out against all odds. Only under Augustus, in the wars against the Cantabrians and Asturians that ended in 19 BC, was the whole peninsula finally pacified.

Becoming Roman

Then something remarkable happened: Hispania became one of the most Roman places in the empire.

• Language. Spoken Latin slowly replaced most local languages, and over the next thousand years it would grow into Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Portuguese. The great exception was Basque, which survived in its mountain valleys.
• Cities and roads. Rome founded or rebuilt cities such as Emerita Augusta (Mérida), Tarraco (Tarragona) and Italica near Seville, linked by roads and supplied by aqueducts. The aqueduct of Segovia still carries its double row of arches across the city.
• Wealth. Hispania exported olive oil, wine, fish sauce (garum) and metals. At Las Médulas, in León, Roman engineers brought down whole mountains with water to get at the gold.
• People. Hispania gave Rome the philosopher Seneca and the poets Lucan and Martial, and two of its greatest emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, came from families settled at Italica.

Rome's legacy in Spain is so deep it is easy to miss: the language, the law, the Catholic Church, the layout of half its cities.

Christianity spread in the second and third centuries. By the time the empire made it the official religion, Hispania had bishops in every important town.

The Visigoths

In 409 three Germanic peoples, the Vandals, Suebi and Alans, broke across the Pyrenees as the western empire fell apart. Rome sent its allies the Visigoths to restore order from 415. The Visigoths had already had a remarkable journey: they had crossed the Danube into Roman territory in 376, destroyed a Roman army and killed an emperor at Adrianople in 378, and sacked Rome itself in 410. Their first real kingdom was not in Spain at all but in southwestern Gaul, with its capital at Toulouse, and for most of the fifth century Hispania was only its southern annex.

That changed in 507, when the Frankish king Clovis, newly converted to Catholicism, defeated and killed the Visigothic king Alaric II at Vouillé, near Poitiers. (The same battle appears at the start of the history of France; the two stories begin tangled together.) The Visigoths lost almost all their Gallic lands and fell back on the peninsula. The Byzantine emperor Justinian took advantage of their quarrels to seize a strip of the southern coast. King Athanagild was the first to fix the royal residence at Toledo, and Leovigild (reigned c. 568–586), brother of Athanagild's successor Liuva I, conquered the Suebian kingdom in Galicia. By the late sixth century, the Visigoths ruled almost the whole peninsula.

They were a small warrior elite ruling a much larger Hispano-Roman population, and at first the two were divided by religion: the Visigoths were Arian Christians, who rejected the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. Leovigild, an Arian, persecuted Catholics; his own son Hermenegild, who had converted, rebelled and was killed. His other son, King Reccared (586–601), converted to Catholicism, and the bishops became partners in government through the great Councils of Toledo. Until then Goths and Romans had lived under separate laws. In the next century King Recceswinth (649–672) issued a single code for everyone, the Liber Iudiciorum, twelve books of law, Roman in spirit, which survived in Castilian translation (the Fuero Juzgo) for centuries. The scholar-bishop Isidore of Seville wrote the Etymologies, an encyclopedia of everything then known, which Europe would copy for a thousand years.

The kingdom had two fatal weaknesses. Its monarchy was elective, so nearly every succession meant a struggle and several kings were murdered or deposed. And its rulers harshly persecuted the peninsula's Jews, with forced baptisms in the seventh century. When an invading army arrived in 711, the kingdom fell almost at once, and later chroniclers would spend centuries trying to explain why.

Part 3 — Al-Andalus: the emirate and the caliphate of Córdoba (711–1031)

The conquest

In 711 an army of Berbers and Arabs, led by a Berber general named Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed from North Africa. The rock where he landed still carries his name: Gibraltar comes from Jabal Tariq, "the mountain of Tariq". He defeated and killed the Visigothic king Roderic near the river Guadalete, and within a few years almost the whole peninsula was under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus. Its new rulers called it al-Andalus.

Why so fast? The Visigothic nobility was divided, and the conquerors usually offered generous terms: towns that surrendered kept their property and their religion in exchange for tribute. Many local people seem to have accepted the change of masters with little resistance.

Only in the mountains of the far north did small Christian lordships hold out. Tradition says that a nobleman named Pelayo beat a Muslim force at Covadonga, in Asturias, in 718 or 722. Historians doubt the scale of the battle, but the kingdom of Asturias that grew from it is the ancestor of León, Castile and, eventually, Spain.

Córdoba, capital of the West

In 750 the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus was overthrown and almost wiped out by the Abbasids. One prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped across North Africa and in 756 made himself emir of Córdoba, independent of Baghdad in all but name. Córdoba, a Roman city and then the seat of a Visigothic duke, became the capital of al-Andalus. In 785 work began on its great mosque, a forest of double-arched columns that later rulers kept enlarging for two centuries.

The building's later history is a small history of Spain. When Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236, the mosque was consecrated as a church. In the sixteenth century the cathedral chapter built a Renaissance cathedral nave in the middle of it, cutting through the forest of columns. Today it is officially the cathedral of Córdoba, and the name visitors use, the Mezquita ("mosque"), is itself a small argument about what it really is.

In 929, his descendant Abd al-Rahman III (912–961) went further and proclaimed himself caliph, a title claiming leadership of the whole Muslim community. This was the high point of al-Andalus. Córdoba became one of the largest cities in western Europe (estimates of its population vary so widely that it is wiser not to quote one), with paved streets, public baths, markets and libraries. Near it the caliph built a palace-city, Madinat al-Zahra. Under the caliph Hisham II, the general and regent al-Mansur ("the victorious", Almanzor in Spanish) raided the Christian north again and again, sacking Barcelona and, in 997, Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of Christian pilgrimage.

How people lived

Al-Andalus was not a land of one people.

Christians and Jews had the status of dhimmi: protected peoples who could keep their religion, property and own courts, in return for loyalty and a special poll tax, the jizya, and some restrictions. Over the centuries, many Christians converted to Islam or adopted Arabic language and dress. Under the caliphs, a Jewish physician and diplomat, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, served Abd al-Rahman III, and Jewish learning flourished.

The economy changed too. Irrigation systems, many building on Roman ones, spread new crops through the south and east: rice, citrus fruit, sugar cane, cotton, aubergines and more. Spanish still names them with Arabic words, as the library's Spanish-language piece on al-Andalus explains: arroz, naranja, azúcar, aceite, acequia (irrigation channel), alcalde (mayor, from the Arabic for "judge").

The caliphate of Córdoba was, for a century, the richest and most sophisticated state in western Europe. That is not a romantic claim; it is what its Christian neighbours thought too, which is why they raided it, paid it tribute, and sent their sick kings to its doctors.

The fall of the caliphate

After al-Mansur died in 1002, his sons and the Umayyad princes fought over the state, Berber and Slav soldiers turned on each other, and Córdoba itself was sacked. In 1031 the caliphate was abolished. In its place rose a patchwork of rival small kingdoms, the taifas (from the Arabic for "faction"), ruled from Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza, Badajoz, Granada and elsewhere. They were rich, cultured and weak, and their Christian neighbours noticed. Córdoba was never again the capital of al-Andalus.

Part 4 — Taifas, frontiers and the "Reconquista" debate (1031–1479)

The frontier moves south

For the next two and a half centuries the frontier between Christian and Muslim Iberia moved, unevenly but mostly southward. The Christian kingdoms (León and Castile in the centre, Navarre and Aragon in the Pyrenees, the county of Barcelona in the east, and Portugal in the west) at first preferred to squeeze the taifas for protection money, called parias, than to conquer them.

El Cid is a good example of why the simple story fails. Castile's great national hero, celebrated in the epic poem Cantar de mio Cid, spent years in exile serving the Muslim king of Zaragoza, fought Christians as well as Muslims, and in the end ruled Valencia as his own prince. His nickname comes from the Arabic sayyid, "lord".

Three religions, one peninsula

As Christian kings conquered Muslim cities, they ruled large Muslim populations, called mudéjares, and kept, for a time, the large Jewish communities. In Toledo, scholars of all three faiths translated Arabic works of philosophy, astronomy and medicine, including Arabic versions of Aristotle and the commentaries of the Córdoban philosopher Averroes, into Latin and Castilian. King Alfonso X, "the Wise" (1252–1284), sponsored law codes (the Siete Partidas), astronomical tables and poetry, and made Castilian a language of learning.

Each Christian kingdom grew its own institutions. Towns received charters, fueros, that set out their rights and drew settlers to the empty frontier lands. Kings consulted assemblies, the Cortes, which in León met with town representatives as early as 1188, among the earliest such assemblies in Europe. Castile's economy turned to sheep: the powerful herders' guild, the Mesta, moved huge flocks of merino sheep between summer and winter pastures, and Castilian wool fed the looms of Flanders. The Crown of Aragon, led by the merchants of Barcelona and Valencia, built a Mediterranean empire that at its height took in Sicily, Sardinia and, briefly, parts of Greece.

The fourteenth century was cruel. The Black Death reached Iberia in 1348. Civil wars brought a new dynasty, the Trastámaras, to the throne of Castile in 1369, and, by the Compromise of Caspe in 1412, to Aragon as well. And in 1391 a wave of attacks on Jewish quarters, beginning in Seville, spread across Castile and Aragon. Thousands were killed and many more were forcibly baptised. Those converts and their descendants, the conversos, would become the main target of the Spanish Inquisition a century later.

What should we call it?

For a long time, Spanish schoolbooks called this whole period the Reconquista, the "reconquest": a single, eight-century war in which Christian Spain took back its land from Muslim invaders. That word is now one of the most argued-over in Spanish history.

The case for the term. Medieval Christian chroniclers did describe their wars as a recovery. A chronicle written at the Asturian court in the late ninth century presented its kings as the heirs of the Visigoths, fighting to restore a lost Christian Spain. Popes granted crusade privileges for Iberian campaigns. And the result, a Christian peninsula, is a fact. Many historians keep using the word as convenient shorthand, as they use "Middle Ages".

The case against it. The word itself was not used by medieval writers; it became standard only in the nineteenth century, when romantic nationalists were writing a story of the Spanish nation. It implies that "Spain" already existed and was simply waiting to be recovered, when in fact the Christian kingdoms were rivals that fought each other constantly and often allied with Muslim rulers. And it treats the Muslims of al-Andalus, most of whom descended from Iberians who had converted, as foreigners in a land their families had lived in for centuries.

The argument goes back to two exiled Spanish historians of the twentieth century. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz saw Spain's character as forged in centuries of struggle against Islam. Américo Castro argued that Spain was made by the living-together, the convivencia, of Christians, Muslims and Jews. Modern historians mostly reject both extremes. There were centuries of real exchange, and centuries of war, hierarchy and persecution, often at the same time. Most now prefer neutral phrases such as "the Christian conquest of al-Andalus", while accepting that the people at the time believed they were restoring something. The word still carries a political charge in Spain today.

Part 5 — The Catholic Monarchs and 1492 (1469–1516)

A marriage that made a country

In October 1469 two teenagers married in Valladolid: Isabella, heir to Castile, and Ferdinand, heir to Aragon. Isabella had to fight a civil war (1474–1479) against the supporters of her niece Juana to win her throne, and in 1479 Ferdinand inherited Aragon. Their two crowns were joined only in their persons; each kingdom kept its own laws, coins, Cortes and customs. Not until their grandson Charles would a single monarch inherit both. But from this point it begins to make sense to speak of "Spain". Pope Alexander VI later gave the couple the title by which they are still known: los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Monarchs.

They tamed the great nobles, created a rural police force (the Santa Hermandad), and in 1478 obtained from Pope Sixtus IV the right to appoint their own inquisitors. The Spanish Inquisition, unlike the medieval one, answered to the crown. Its main targets at first were conversos suspected of secretly practising Judaism. Its first inquisitor general, the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, gave it its rules. It would last, with interruptions, until 1834.

1492: the hinge year

Three events of 1492 shaped Spain for the next three centuries.

Granada. After a ten-year war, Muhammad XII, known to the Spanish as Boabdil, surrendered the last Muslim kingdom on 2 January 1492. The terms of surrender promised Granada's Muslims that they could keep their faith, mosques and laws.

The expulsion of the Jews. On 31 March 1492, in the newly conquered Alhambra, the monarchs signed an edict ordering every Jew in their kingdoms to convert or leave within four months. The stated reason was that Jews were leading conversos back to Judaism. Many Jews converted; many others went to Portugal (which forced conversions on them five years later), North Africa, Italy and above all the Ottoman Empire, where Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. How many left is genuinely uncertain. Older estimates ran to hundreds of thousands; most modern historians put it at somewhere between about 40,000 and 100,000. Their descendants, the Sephardim (from Sefarad, the Hebrew name for Iberia), carried a form of medieval Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino, to Salonica, Istanbul, Sarajevo and beyond, and kept it for five centuries. In 2015 Spain passed a law offering citizenship to their descendants.

Columbus. In April, at their camp outside Granada, the monarchs agreed to back the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus, who had spent years trying to sell his plan to sail west to Asia, first in Portugal and then in Castile; experts had rejected it, correctly, on the grounds that he had badly underestimated the size of the Earth. He sailed from Palos on 3 August with three small ships and on 12 October 1492 reached an island in the Bahamas. He died in 1506 still insisting he had reached Asia. Spain's national day is still 12 October, fixed by a law of 1987, though what the date should celebrate is itself argued over, in Spain and across the Americas.

Two years later, in 1494, Castile and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the newly found lands between them along a line drawn down the Atlantic: the lands to the west for Castile, to the east for Portugal. That line is the reason Brazil speaks Portuguese while the rest of South America speaks Spanish. What followed in the Americas, conquest, epidemic, the encomienda, silver and the mixing of peoples, is the subject of the library's Spanish-language piece 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos.

In the same year the scholar Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramática de la lengua castellana, often called the first grammar of a modern European language. In its prologue, addressed to the queen, he wrote that language had always been the companion of empire.

In one year, Spain became territorially whole, religiously exclusive and suddenly global. The three facts would be bound together for centuries.

Unity by force

The promises made at Granada did not last. Between 1499 and 1502, under pressure from Cardinal Cisneros, the Muslims of Granada and then of all Castile were made to choose baptism or exile. Most were baptised, becoming moriscos. Ferdinand added Naples (1504) and the Spanish part of Navarre (1512), and Castile planted outposts on the North African coast and completed its conquest of the Canary Islands, a rehearsal, in many ways, for the Americas.

The monarchs also built a new idea of who counted as a true Spaniard. Converts and their descendants were increasingly barred from offices, religious orders and colleges by statutes of "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre), which made ancestry, not belief, the test. Those rules lasted for centuries.

When Isabella died in 1504 her daughter Juana inherited Castile, but she was judged unfit to rule, and her father and then her son governed in her name. History calls her Juana la Loca, "the Mad"; some historians now ask how much of that madness was real and how much was useful to the men who ruled in her place. Ferdinand died in 1516. Their grandson, a young man raised in Flanders who spoke no Spanish, was about to inherit more of the world than anyone had ever done.

Part 6 — Empire and Golden Age: the Habsburgs (1516–1700)

The empire on which the sun never set

Charles (Charles I of Spain, 1516–1556, and from 1519 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) inherited Castile and its American conquests, Aragon with Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, the Netherlands and Franche-Comté from his Burgundian grandmother, and the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs. Castile resented a foreign king who filled offices with Flemings and spent its money on German wars: the revolt of the Comuneros (1520–1521), led by the towns of Castile, was crushed at Villalar.

Meanwhile conquistadors, operating under royal licence, toppled the Aztec Empire (1521) and the Inca Empire (1532 onward), and the crown organised its American lands into the viceroyalties of New Spain (1535) and Peru (1542). In 1545 a mountain of silver was found at Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, and the following year rich mines opened at Zacatecas in Mexico. American silver, mined largely by forced Indigenous labour, flowed through Seville and paid for Spain's armies, and then flowed out again to bankers in Genoa and Augsburg and on to China. Spain's own theologians debated the morality of all this: in 1550–1551 the crown convened a formal debate at Valladolid in which the friar Bartolomé de las Casas condemned the conquest's violence and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defended it. (The debate was about whether wars of conquest were just, not, as is often said, about whether Indigenous people had souls.)

His son Philip II (1556–1598) ruled from a new, fixed capital, Madrid (1561), and from the monastery-palace of El Escorial. He was the most powerful ruler of his age and in some ways its most hard-pressed:

• His fleet, with Venice and the Papacy, beat the Ottomans at Lepanto (1571).
• He inherited Portugal in 1580, and with it Portugal's empire in Brazil, Africa and Asia; for sixty years the whole peninsula had one king.
• The Dutch Revolt, from 1568, began an eighty-year war he could never win.
• His Armada against England was wrecked in 1588.
• The crown repeatedly suspended payments to its bankers. Spain was rich in silver and permanently short of cash.

"The sun never sets on my dominions" is a line attributed to Philip II. Like most famous lines, the exact words are hard to pin down. The fact behind it is not: his realms spanned every time zone of the known world.

The Golden Age

The same century and a half produced Spain's Siglo de Oro, its Golden Age of literature and painting. Most of it came out of an empire that was, politically, already in trouble.

The anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) started the picaresque novel, the story of a poor boy surviving by his wits, which held a mirror to a society obsessed with honour and "purity of blood". At the University of Salamanca, theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria argued about the rights of conquered peoples and laid foundations for international law, while others developed early ideas about money and prices.

Decline, or something more complicated?

The seventeenth century was hard. The crown expelled the moriscos between 1609 and 1614, perhaps around 300,000 people, by the classic estimate (recent research suggests a significant number managed to stay or return). Plague returned in waves. Castile's population stagnated.

Maddison Project Database 2023; GDP per person in 2011 international dollars. Early figures are rough reconstructions.

Under Philip IV (1621–1665) his minister Olivares tried to make the other kingdoms share Castile's burden. In 1640 both Catalonia and Portugal revolted. Barcelona surrendered in 1652; Portugal won its independence for good. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) recognised the Dutch Republic, and the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) gave France Roussillon and part of Cerdanya, moving the border to where it is today. The last Habsburg, Charles II (1665–1700), was sickly and childless, and Europe watched his body as if it were a stock market.

Spaniards at the time, the arbitristas, wrote endless memoranda on the causes of decline: too many nobles and clergy, too few workers, too much silver, too little industry. Some modern historians, such as Henry Kamen, argue that "decline" is the wrong frame: that Spain had never been as strong as its empire looked, since it relied on Italian bankers, Flemish soldiers and American silver, and that the empire held together far longer than its rivals expected. Either way, by 1700 the question was not how great Spain would be, but who would get it.

Part 7 — Bourbons, Napoleon and the Constitution of Cádiz (1700–1833)

A French king for Spain

Charles II died on 1 November 1700, leaving his crown to Philip of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV of France. The rest of Europe, fearing a single Bourbon superpower, backed a rival Habsburg candidate, and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) became both a European war and a Spanish civil war: Castile mostly backed Philip, while much of the Crown of Aragon, including Catalonia, backed the Habsburg Archduke Charles.

Philip won his throne, but at a price. By the treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714) Spain lost its European possessions in Italy and the Netherlands, and Britain kept Gibraltar, which it still holds. Barcelona fell to Philip's army on 11 September 1714, after a long siege; Catalans now mark that day, the Diada, as their national day. Philip V then abolished the separate laws and institutions of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia and Mallorca by the Nueva Planta decrees (1707–1716), imposing a centralised, Castilian-style government. To defenders of the Bourbon state, this was modernisation; to many Catalans, it is the moment their nation lost its liberties, and the memory of it powers Catalan nationalism to this day.

Enlightened despotism

The eighteenth century was a recovery. Spain's population grew from under 9 million to about 12 million by 1820. Royal academies were founded, including the Real Academia Española (1713), which still publishes the official dictionary, and the Real Academia de la Historia (1738). Charles III (1759–1788), previously king of Naples, was the model "enlightened despot": he improved Madrid's streets and lighting, built the museum building that would become the Prado, curbed the Church's privileges, expelled the Jesuits (1767), and loosened Cádiz's monopoly on trade with the Americas. Reform came from above; the king's ministers were reformers, not democrats.

Then the French Revolution broke the alliance between the two Bourbon crowns. Spain fought revolutionary France, made peace, switched sides again, and saw its fleet destroyed alongside the French at Trafalgar in 1805. The court of Charles IV was dominated by his favourite, Manuel Godoy, and by a feud between the king and his son Ferdinand.

1808: the people rise

In March 1808, a riot at Aranjuez forced Charles IV to abdicate in favour of Ferdinand. Napoleon, whose troops were already in Spain on their way to Portugal, summoned both to Bayonne, in France, forced them both to give up the crown, and made his brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Spain.

But the Spanish people had not been consulted. On 2 May 1808, crowds in Madrid rose against the French garrison; the next day French firing squads shot hundreds of prisoners. Francisco de Goya painted both days six years later, and The Third of May 1808, with its man in a white shirt, arms raised before the faceless rifles, became one of the first great images of modern war. In July a Spanish army forced a whole French corps to surrender at Bailén. Napoleon came in person with a huge army and retook Madrid, but he could never pacify the country.

What followed, the War of Independence (1808–1814), was fought by regular armies, by a British army under Wellington, and by bands of irregular fighters waging what Spaniards called a guerrilla, a "little war". The word passed into English and every other language.

The Constitution of Cádiz

While the French occupied most of Spain, the resistance governed from the besieged port of Cádiz. There, in 1810, a parliament, the Cortes, assembled, with deputies from Spain and from the American territories. On 19 March 1812, Saint Joseph's Day, it promulgated a constitution that Spaniards nicknamed La Pepa.

It was one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, and it travelled: revolutionaries in Naples and Piedmont proclaimed it in 1820–1821, Portugal's first constitution, of 1822, was modelled on it, and its influence reached Latin America. The deputies who supported it were called liberales, and that is the origin of "liberal" as a political word.

It did not last. When Ferdinand VII came home in 1814, welcomed as "the Desired", he abolished the constitution and arrested its authors. In 1820 an army officer, Rafael del Riego, led a revolt that forced the king to restore it, but in 1823 a French army, sent by the conservative monarchies of Europe, put Ferdinand back in absolute power. Meanwhile, the American territories had begun their own wars of independence in 1810; by the mid-1820s, of the great empire, only Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines remained. That story is told in the Spanish-language piece La Independencia: Cómo Nació un Continente.

Part 8 — A century of civil wars and pronunciamientos (1833–1931)

Carlists and liberals

When Ferdinand VII died in 1833, he left the throne to his two-year-old daughter, Isabella II, having changed the succession law to let a woman inherit. His brother Carlos refused to accept it. His supporters, the Carlists, stood for God, the king, and the old local laws, the fueros; they were strongest in Navarre, the Basque Country and rural Catalonia. Isabella's regents turned to the liberals for support. The result was the first of three Carlist wars (1833–1840, 1846–1849, 1872–1876), real civil wars that set the conservative, Catholic countryside against the liberal cities.

The liberal state that won was weak, and the army filled the gap. Through the century, generals made and unmade governments by pronunciamiento: a formal declaration by an officer, backed by his troops, demanding a change of government. Spain had constitutions in 1812, 1834, 1837, 1845, 1869, 1876 and 1931 (and drafts that never took effect). The rule of thumb was that each political faction wrote its own.

Land, railways and the two Spains

Liberal governments sold off the vast lands of the Church and the towns, in the desamortización of Mendizábal (1836) and Madoz (1855), hoping to create a nation of small farmers and to pay the debt. Instead, most of the land went to those who already had money, and in the south it strengthened the great estates, the latifundios, worked by landless day labourers. That rural poverty would feed anarchism and, in the 1930s, revolution.

Industry came late and unevenly. Catalonia built a textile industry, the Basque Country an iron and steel industry, and foreign, mostly French, capital built the railways. Most of the country remained agricultural and poor. In 1900, Spain's GDP per person was about 60 percent of France's.

Revolution, a king from Italy, and a republic

In 1868 a liberal revolt, La Gloriosa, drove Isabella II into exile. The new constitution of 1869 brought universal male suffrage and freedom of religion. Spain then went shopping for a king and found one in Amadeo of Savoy, son of the king of Italy, who arrived in 1871 and, worn down by Carlist war, republican opposition and quarrelling politicians, gave up in early 1873. The First Republic (1873–1874) had four presidents in under a year, faced a new Carlist war, a revolt in Cuba and local "cantonal" uprisings in which cities such as Cartagena declared themselves independent. A general's pronunciamiento ended it.

The Restoration and the "Disaster"

The monarchy came back with Isabella's son, Alfonso XII, and a new constitution in 1876, which lasted until 1923. Its architect, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, designed a system in which two parties, his Conservatives and Práxedes Sagasta's Liberals, took turns in power, the turno pacífico. Elections were fixed by local bosses, the caciques. It brought stability and corruption in equal measure.

Outside the system, new movements grew: the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), founded in 1879; the anarchist trade union, the CNT, founded in 1910, which became one of the largest anarchist movements in the world; and regional nationalist parties in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

In 1898, war with the United States over Cuba cost Spain its last major colonies: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Spaniards call it simply el Desastre. A group of writers known as the Generation of '98 (Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, Pío Baroja and others) turned it into a searching examination of what was wrong with Spain.

Spain stayed neutral in the First World War, and grew rich selling to both sides, but the boom brought inflation and strikes, and in Barcelona employers and anarchists fought a small war of assassinations. A new colonial war in Morocco went badly; at Annual, in 1921, Moroccan fighters led by Abd el-Krim routed a Spanish army, killing thousands. In 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera made himself dictator with the support of King Alfonso XIII. He built roads and dams, but by 1930 he had lost the army's support and resigned. The king had tied himself to the dictatorship, and he would fall with it.

In the decades around 1900, very large numbers of Spaniards, many from Galicia, Asturias and the Canary Islands, left for the Americas, especially Argentina and Cuba. A Spanish surname in Buenos Aires or Havana today is often the trace of that migration.

Part 9 — The Second Republic and the Civil War (1931–1939)

The Republic of hope

In municipal elections on 12 April 1931, republicans and socialists swept the cities. Two days later, on 14 April, the Second Republic was proclaimed, and Alfonso XIII left the country without formally abdicating. Crowds danced in the streets.

The new Republic's leaders, above all Manuel Azaña, wanted to modernise Spain in a hurry. The constitution of December 1931 declared Spain "a democratic republic of workers of all classes". It separated Church and state, legalised divorce, and gave women the vote, after a famous parliamentary battle won by the deputy Clara Campoamor. Women voted in a general election for the first time in 1933. Catalonia received a statute of autonomy in 1932. The government cut the bloated officer corps, built thousands of schools, and began an agrarian reform to give land to the landless.

Each reform made enemies. The Church saw itself persecuted; the army humiliated; landowners threatened. On the other side, anarchists and many socialists thought the reforms far too slow, and land seizures and strikes spread. Spain had become two Spains, a phrase Antonio Machado had used years before.

The coup that became a war

After the Popular Front won the elections of February 1936, the country slid into violence: street battles between left and right militants, land occupations, church burnings, assassinations. On 13 July the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo was murdered by police officers and socialist militants. On 17 July 1936, army garrisons in Spanish Morocco rose, and the next day the rising spread to the mainland.

The coup was meant to take power in days. It failed in half the country. Where workers' militias and loyal police beat the rebels, as in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, the Republic held; where the officers won, as in Seville, Galicia and Old Castile, they took control. Spain split in two, and a coup became a war.

The rebels called themselves the Nationalists. Their commander in Morocco, Francisco Franco, flew in African troops with German and Italian help and, on 1 October 1936, was named head of state. On the other side, the Republicans were a coalition of liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, and Basque and Catalan nationalists, who fought one another as well as the enemy. In the first months, anarchist and socialist revolutionaries collectivised factories and farms in Catalonia and Aragon.

A world war in rehearsal

The war became international almost immediately. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sent planes, tanks and troops to Franco. The Soviet Union sent equipment and advisers to the Republic, which paid in gold. Britain and France chose "non-intervention", an agreement that Germany, Italy and the USSR signed and then ignored. Around 40,000 foreign volunteers fought for the Republic in the International Brigades, and about 20,000 more served in medical and support units.

On 26 April 1937, aircraft of Germany's Condor Legion, with Italian planes, bombed the Basque town of Guernica. How many died is still disputed: the Basque government reported 1,654 at the time, while later local research identified about 150 victims by name, and most recent estimates are in the low hundreds. Pablo Picasso's huge painting of it, made weeks later for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, is now in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid. Writers and artists from across the world came to see or fight: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia describes the Republican infighting in Barcelona in May 1937; Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was set in the war.

The Nationalists, better armed and united under one command, won slowly. They besieged Madrid from November 1936 but never took it by assault. They conquered the north in 1937, cut the Republic in two by reaching the Mediterranean in April 1938, won the long battle of the Ebro, and overran Catalonia in January 1939. In the last days of the war, Republicans fought each other in Madrid. Nationalist troops entered the capital on 28 March, and on 1 April 1939 Franco declared the war over.

Counting the dead

"Nationalist forces put the figure at 1,000,000 ... More recent estimates have been closer to 500,000 or less." — Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Spanish Civil War"

How many died is still argued, partly because so many were killed far from the front, buried in unmarked graves, and never recorded. Historians' estimates:

Both sides killed civilians in their rear zones. Most historians, as Britannica summarises, conclude that Republican violence was concentrated in the early chaos, before the government re-established control, while Nationalist killing was a deliberate policy of terror and continued long after the war, and that the Nationalist toll was higher. Francoist accounts, for decades the only permitted version inside Spain, presented the war as a crusade to save Christian Spain from a "red terror". Exiled Republicans presented it as the defence of an elected government against a fascist coup. Both had their dead to point to.

Part 10 — Franco's Spain (1939–1975)

Victory, not peace

Franco did not offer reconciliation. His regime was a military dictatorship with one legal party (the Falange, merged with other right-wing groups), one official trade union, and a Church restored to its privileges. The statutes of autonomy were abolished, and public use of Catalan, Basque and Galician was suppressed. Under the Law of Political Responsibilities, people could be punished for having supported the Republic since 1934. Tens of thousands were executed, hundreds of thousands passed through prisons, camps and labour battalions, and around half a million had fled abroad. Among the exiles were the poet Antonio Machado, who died just over the French border weeks after crossing it, and the Catalan president Lluís Companys, handed back by the Gestapo and shot in Barcelona in 1940.

The economy suffered too. Franco tried self-sufficiency, autarquía: state control, rationing and import substitution. The 1940s are remembered as los años del hambre, the years of hunger. According to the Maddison Project, Spain's output per person did not regain its 1929 level until the mid-1950s.

The Second World War and the Cold War

Franco owed his victory to Hitler and Mussolini, and in 1940 he met Hitler at Hendaye, on the French border, to discuss entering the war. He asked a high price (much of French North Africa) and did not join. Spain sent a volunteer force, the Blue Division, to fight beside the Germans against the Soviet Union, and supplied Germany with minerals, but stayed officially out of the war. After 1945 the victorious Allies shunned the regime, and Spain was kept out of the new United Nations.

The regime dressed itself for the new world. In 1947 a Law of Succession, approved by referendum, declared Spain a kingdom again, with Franco as head of state for life and the right to name the future king. There was no king yet; there would not be one until Franco died.

The Cold War rescued Franco. An anticommunist dictatorship looked useful to Washington. In 1953 Spain signed a concordat with the Vatican and the Pact of Madrid with the United States, which allowed American bases in exchange for aid. In 1955 Spain joined the United Nations.

Outside Madrid, near El Escorial, the regime built its monument to the war: the Valley of the Fallen, a vast basilica cut into a mountain beneath a giant cross, built in part by Republican prisoners and opened in 1959. Franco was buried there in 1975. Few places in Spain are argued over more.

The "miracle"

By the late 1950s the economy was close to bankruptcy. Franco let a new team of technocrats, several linked to the Catholic organisation Opus Dei, take over economic policy. Their Stabilisation Plan of 1959 opened Spain to foreign trade and investment. What followed was one of the fastest booms in the world.

Maddison Project Database 2023. Between 1960 and 1975, output per person grew by about 6 percent a year.

Three forces drove it. Northern European tourists poured into the Mediterranean coast. Huge numbers of Spaniards moved from the poor countryside of Andalusia, Extremadura and Castile to Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country, and many more went abroad to work in France, Germany and Switzerland, sending money home. And foreign companies built factories behind tariff walls: the SEAT 600, a small car built under Fiat licence, became the symbol of a family's first taste of prosperity.

Defenders of Franco's record point to this growth, to the forty years without war, and to a modern middle class that would later make democracy possible. Critics answer that the boom came after the regime abandoned its own economic policies; that similar growth happened in democratic neighbours; that it was paid for by emigrants and by workers without free unions; and that nothing excuses the repression. Both points can be true at once, and Spain still argues about the balance.

The regime's last years

Society changed faster than the regime. Students and workers began to organise illegally, with clandestine unions (the Workers' Commissions, CCOO), strikes and protests. The Catholic Church, after the Second Vatican Council, started to distance itself. In the Basque Country a new group, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, "Basque Homeland and Freedom"), founded in 1959, turned to violence; its first deliberate killing came in 1968. In 1969 Franco named Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, grandson of Alfonso XIII, as his successor, expecting him to continue the regime. In December 1973 ETA killed Franco's prime minister and closest ally, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, with a bomb that threw his car over a building in Madrid.

Franco died in bed on 20 November 1975, after a long illness. Two days later Juan Carlos was proclaimed king. Almost nobody knew what he would do.

Part 11 — The Transition and the new democracy (1975–2008)

Reform, not rupture

The king's first government changed little. In July 1976 he appointed a 43-year-old former official of the regime's own party, Adolfo Suárez, as prime minister. The opposition was disappointed. Suárez then did what few expected. He persuaded the Francoist parliament to pass a Law for Political Reform that created an elected two-chamber parliament, in effect voting itself out of existence, and put it to a referendum in December 1976, which approved it overwhelmingly. Political parties were legalised, including, in April 1977, the Communist Party, a move that enraged much of the army. Exiles came home.

The transition was not peaceful, whatever its later reputation. ETA's deadliest years were 1978 to 1980, just as democracy was being built; in January 1977 far-right gunmen burst into a labour lawyers' office on Atocha street in Madrid and murdered five people, three lawyers, a law student and an office worker; and the threat of a military coup hung over everything.

On 15 June 1977 Spain held its first free general election in 41 years. Suárez's centrist coalition, the UCD, won, with Felipe González's Socialists second. The new parliament passed an amnesty law in October 1977, freeing political prisoners and, at the same time, shielding the officials of the dictatorship from prosecution. That same month, the government and the opposition signed the Moncloa Pacts, a deal on wages and economic reform to fight high inflation.

The Constitution of 1978

Seven deputies from across the spectrum, the "fathers of the constitution", drafted a new text by consensus: centrists, a socialist, a communist, a conservative ex-minister of Franco, and a Catalan nationalist. Voters approved it in a referendum on 6 December 1978, now a national holiday. In 2026 the Congress of Deputies marked it with an exhibition titled, simply, "our longest-lived constitution".

The deliberate ambiguity of "nationalities" was the price of consensus: Catalan and Basque nationalists could read it as recognition that they were nations; Spanish centralists could read it as nothing of the kind. Much of the politics of the next half-century has been a fight over what that word means.

23-F and after

Suárez resigned in January 1981, worn out by his own party's divisions. On 23 February, during the vote to install his successor, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, came Tejero's assault on Congress, described at the start of this history. The coup's real leaders were senior generals, Jaime Milans del Bosch in Valencia and Alfonso Armada, a former close aide of the king. When Juan Carlos refused to back them and ordered the army to obey the constitution, the plot collapsed. The plotters were tried and imprisoned. The king's conduct that night won him the loyalty of many Spaniards who had no particular love of monarchy; his later reputation would fall a long way.

In October 1982 the Socialists won a landslide, and Felipe González governed until 1996. That a party defeated in the Civil War could take power peacefully, and that the army accepted it, is often taken as the moment the transition ended.

Joining Europe

González took Spain into the European Economic Community, which it joined on 1 January 1986 together with Portugal. Spain had joined NATO in 1982; after promising to take it out, González instead campaigned to stay in and won a referendum in 1986. EU structural funds paid for motorways and high-speed trains; in 1992, Barcelona hosted the Olympic Games and Seville a World Expo, and Spain showed the world a country that seemed to have reinvented itself in fifteen years. It introduced divorce and a limited abortion law in the 1980s, built a universal national health system, and decentralised power to the regions.

The González years ended in scandal: corruption cases and, worst of all, the revelation that officials had organised death squads, the GAL, which killed suspected ETA members and some innocent people in the 1980s. The conservative People's Party (PP) under José María Aznar won in 1996, privatised state companies, met the criteria to join the euro from its launch in 1999, and presided over a long boom.

11-M

Aznar backed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, against the views of most Spaniards. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election, bombs planted by a jihadist cell exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 193 people. The government insisted for days that ETA was responsible; when the evidence pointed to jihadists, angry voters turned against it, and the Socialists under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won. Zapatero withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq and passed a series of social laws, among them, in 2005, the legalisation of same-sex marriage, making Spain the third country in the world to do so, after the Netherlands and Belgium, and in 2007 the Law of Historical Memory, which condemned the dictatorship and helped families search for the bodies of relatives in mass graves.

Throughout this period, ETA kept killing: politicians, police officers, soldiers, journalists and bystanders. Between 1968 and 2010 it killed 829 people. In October 2011 it announced the definitive end of its armed campaign, and in May 2018 it dissolved itself.

Part 12 — Crisis, Catalonia and Spain in 2026 (2008–2026)

The bubble bursts

In the 2000s Spain built houses as no European country ever had, financed by cheap euro-denominated credit, and its savings banks lent freely to developers. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the bubble burst. Construction collapsed, and so did employment.

INE, Encuesta de Población Activa (Labour Force Survey), as published for each quarter.

In 2012 the eurozone agreed a package of up to €100 billion to recapitalise Spain's banks, and the PP government of Mariano Rajoy, elected with an absolute majority in November 2011, cut spending and raised taxes. Output per person fell by about 7 percent between 2007 and 2013. A generation of young Spaniards, many with degrees, emigrated or stayed home with their parents.

The crisis broke the two-party system. On 15 May 2011, protesters occupied Madrid's Puerta del Sol and squares across the country: the Indignados or 15-M movement, angry at unemployment, corruption and politicians who "don't represent us". From it came Podemos, founded in 2014 on the radical left; at the same time a liberal party, Ciudadanos, rose in the centre, and later, from 2018–2019, the nationalist, anti-immigration right-wing party Vox became the first party of the hard right to win seats in parliament since the early 1980s. In 2014, King Juan Carlos, damaged by scandals including an elephant-hunting trip in Botswana during the crisis, abdicated in favour of his son, who became Felipe VI on 19 June 2014.

In June 2018 a court ruling on a PP corruption case led to the first successful motion of no confidence in Spain's democratic history, and the Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez became prime minister. He has governed ever since, in minority governments and from 2020 in coalition with parties to his left, through the Covid pandemic and repeated elections, often depending on the votes of Catalan and Basque nationalists.

Catalonia, 2017

Catalonia, with about 8 million people, its own language, its own institutions and a strong economy, has always had a distinct identity inside Spain. For decades most Catalan nationalists sought more autonomy, not independence. Three things changed that. In 2006, Catalonia approved a new statute of autonomy that described Catalonia as a nation; in 2010, after a challenge by the PP, the Constitutional Court struck down or reinterpreted parts of it, which many Catalans experienced as a breach of a pact. The economic crisis made many feel that Catalonia was paying for the rest of Spain. And from 2012, huge peaceful demonstrations on the Diada turned support for independence into a mass movement.

On 1 October 2017 the Catalan government held a referendum on independence that the Constitutional Court had suspended and the Spanish government declared illegal. National police tried to stop the voting, and images of officers baton-charging voters went around the world. The Catalan government reported that about 2.3 million people had voted, roughly 43 percent of the electorate, and that 90 percent had voted yes; most opponents of independence had boycotted the vote, and there was no independent oversight of the count. On 27 October the Catalan parliament declared independence. The same day, the Spanish Senate authorised the government to apply Article 155 of the Constitution: Madrid dismissed the Catalan government, dissolved the Catalan parliament and called new regional elections. The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, left for Belgium. In the elections of December 2017, pro-independence parties again won a majority of seats (70 of 135), though not of votes.

How each side sees it:

The independence movement: Catalonia is a nation, with its own language and a history of lost liberties going back to 1714. It sought an agreed referendum, as Scotland had in 2014, and was refused. The vote of 1 October was a peaceful exercise of democracy met with police violence, and the leaders later jailed were political prisoners.

Spanish governments and unionists: the Constitution, approved in 1978 by more than 90 percent of Catalan voters, places sovereignty in the Spanish people as a whole; no region can secede by itself. The Catalan government's laws for the referendum were passed in a rushed session that overrode its own parliament's rules and the minority's rights. The vote had no electoral roll or independent oversight. Roughly half of Catalans, by every count, did not want independence, and hundreds of thousands of them marched for unity in Barcelona days after the vote.

Those in between: many Catalans, including the Catalan Socialists and parts of the left, opposed both the unilateral declaration and the police response, and argued for dialogue, a federal reform or an agreed vote.

The aftermath went through the courts and then through politics. In October 2019, Spain's Supreme Court sentenced nine leaders to between 9 and 13 years for sedition and other crimes. In 2021 the Sánchez government pardoned them. After the 2023 general election, Sánchez needed the votes of Puigdemont's party, Junts, to stay in power, and in exchange passed an amnesty law in 2024 for those involved in the independence process, which his opponents called a bargain for power and his supporters a step toward reconciliation. In the Catalan elections of May 2024, the Catalan Socialists came first and the pro-independence parties lost their majority for the first time in more than a decade; in August 2024 Salvador Illa became Catalonia's president. Puigdemont, still living in Belgium, remained outside the amnesty's full protection while the courts argued over the embezzlement charges against him. The question has not gone away, but in 2026 it is quieter than at any time since 2012.

Spain in 2026

Spain entered the mid-2020s with an economy that had recovered from the crisis, driven by tourism, services and immigration, and an unemployment rate that, though still high by European standards, had fallen to about 10 percent, less than half its 2013 peak. Its population reached a record 49.8 million on 1 July 2026, according to the INE, and more than 10.2 million of those residents were born abroad; in the second quarter of 2026 the largest groups of new arrivals were Colombians, Venezuelans and Moroccans. Almost all of Spain's recent population growth has come from immigration. In July 2026 its football team won the World Cup, beating France in the semi-final and Argentina in the final.

2026 was also a year of shocks. In January a high-speed rail collision near Adamuz, in Andalusia, killed 46 people. Over the summer a mass crossing of migrants into the North African enclave of Ceuta set off a crisis with Morocco and a fierce domestic argument. Rents and house prices became the country's central political issue, and housing protests filled the streets in the autumn. When the coalition's housing laws were voted down, by the right and the far right and without the support of Junts, Sánchez dissolved parliament: by Royal Decree 806/2026 of 5 October, a general election was called for 29 November 2026. Then, on 28 October, two high-speed trains collided near Urda, in the province of Toledo, killing at least 69 people, Europe's deadliest rail accident since a derailment near Santiago de Compostela in 2013. The campaign began, as the Guardian put it, in a country "deep in shock and grief", with Sánchez also facing corruption investigations around his family and inner circle, and the PP and Vox competing over how hard to attack him.

Part 13 — How to understand Spain today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. Spain is plural, and has never fully settled how plural. From the Iberians and Celts to the Crowns of Castile and Aragon to the seventeen autonomous communities, the peninsula's regions have repeatedly had their own languages, laws and loyalties. Catalan, Basque and Galician are spoken by millions. The Constitution's balancing of "the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation" with the autonomy of "nationalities and regions" is a truce, not a final answer, and every Spanish government must manage it.

2. Religion shaped the state, then the state broke with religion. Spain was built in 1492 on religious unity enforced by expulsion and the Inquisition, and Catholicism was the official faith for most of its history, including under Franco. Today the Constitution says that no faith shall have the character of a state religion, Spain was the third country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage (2005), and it legalised euthanasia in 2021. Few countries have moved so far, so fast.

3. The past is not past: the argument over memory. The transition of 1975–1982 worked partly through an informal "pact of forgetting": no trials, no truth commission, amnesty for all. Its defenders say it bought peace and democracy at a moment when the army could have crushed both. Its critics say it left tens of thousands of murdered Republicans in unmarked graves and let the dictatorship off the hook. The Historical Memory Law of 2007, under whose rules Franco's remains were moved out of his monumental tomb in 2019, and the Democratic Memory Law of 2022, which renamed the Valley of the Fallen as the Valley of Cuelgamuros and commits the state to searching for the missing, are cherished by one side and condemned by the other as reopening wounds.

4. Spain looks two ways: to Europe and to the Americas. Joining the European Communities in 1986 was the seal of its return to democracy. But Spanish is spoken by hundreds of millions of people in the Americas, and Colombians and Venezuelans are now among the largest groups of new arrivals in Spain. A history that begins in Iberian caves runs, through 1492, straight into Bogotá, Lima and Mexico City.

5. Booms and busts are a pattern. American silver, then bankruptcy; the 1960s miracle, then the 1970s oil shocks; the euro boom, then 27 percent unemployment. Spain's economy is now more diverse and its banks better regulated, but its dependence on tourism and construction, and its housing crisis, show that the pattern has not been fully broken.

Spain is a country that turned a civil war into a democracy by agreeing not to settle its arguments, only to stop killing over them. Nearly fifty years later, it is still arguing. That is not a failure. It is what democracy is supposed to look like.

The takeaway

Spain is one of the oldest inhabited places in Europe and one of the youngest democracies in the West. A peninsula of many peoples was unified by Rome, divided by the conquest of 711, slowly conquered by Christian kingdoms, forged into a single, Catholic monarchy in 1492 and, within a generation, made the centre of a global empire. It lost that empire over three centuries, lived through a nineteenth century of civil wars and coups, a brief democratic Republic, a devastating civil war and nearly four decades of dictatorship, and then built, by negotiation, a democracy that has survived a coup, terrorism, a deep economic crisis and an attempted secession. The questions it argues about today, how to hold together nations within a nation, how to remember the Civil War, and how to keep its booms from turning into busts, are the oldest in its history.

Try this: next time you hear Spanish, pick one word and trace it. Aceite (oil) and alcalde (mayor) are Arabic; Gibraltar is "the mountain of Tariq"; guerrilla left Spain for every language in 1808; liberal was born in Cádiz in 1812. Each word is a layer of the history above. If you visit Spain, stand in the Mezquita of Córdoba, where a Renaissance cathedral sits inside an eighth-century mosque, and ask yourself which story the building is telling.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Archaeological Site of Atapuerca" and "Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain" (inscription 1985, extension 2008); a 2025 paper in Nature on the Sima del Elefante face (1.4–1.1 million years); Bermúdez de Castro et al., Science 276 (1997), naming Homo antecessor; Pike et al., Science 336 (2012), uranium-series dates for Altamira and El Castillo (via PubMed).
- Enciclopedia Treccani, "Spagna" (history sections, updated to October 2026), for the chronology from Roman Hispania to 2026; "Visigoti" for the Visigothic kingdom; "Cordova" for the mosque-cathedral; "Inquisizione" for the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834).
- NATO, "Spain and NATO" (accession 1982, referendum 1986); Boletín Oficial del Estado texts of the Constitution of 1978 and of the laws cited (amnesty 1977, national day 1987, same-sex marriage 2005, Historical Memory 2007, Sephardic nationality 2015, euthanasia 2021, Democratic Memory 2022, amnesty 2024); Reina Sofía museum, Guernica collection notes.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Spanish Civil War" (revised October 2026): dates, foreign intervention, International Brigades, overall death toll, and the character of the two terrors. Ranges of repression and exile follow the historians named there and in the scholarly literature (Paul Preston, Julián Casanova, Hugh Thomas, Stanley Payne, Antonio Montero Moreno).
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen): population and GDP per person, 1500–2022.
- Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE): Labour Force Survey for Q1 2013 and Q3 2026; Estadística Continua de Población, 1 July 2026.
- Boletín Oficial del Estado, Real Decreto 806/2026, de 5 de octubre (dissolution of the Cortes and election of 29 November 2026); La Moncloa, list of prime ministers since 1978.
- The Guardian, reporting of 19 July 2026 (World Cup final), 29–30 October 2026 (Urda and Adamuz rail collisions; the election campaign).
- Expulsion of the Jews and of the moriscos: estimates as summarised in the scholarly literature (Joseph Pérez; Henri Lapeyre; Trevor Dadson), and the library's own Al-Ándalus y la Herencia Árabe en el Español.

Go deeper
- 📘 Spain: A Unique History — Stanley G. Payne (a compact, opinionated single-volume history by a leading historian of modern Spain)
- 📘 Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 — J. H. Elliott (the classic account of the empire's rise and troubles)
- 📘 The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge — Paul Preston (the best short history of the war, by its leading British historian; read with Payne for a different emphasis)
- 📘 The Ornament of the World — María Rosa Menocal (the most-read case for al-Andalus as a culture of coexistence; pair it with its critics, such as Darío Fernández-Morera's The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise)
- 📘 Ghosts of Spain — Giles Tremlett (a journalist's travels through modern Spain's memory of the Civil War and Franco)
- 🌐 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (home of Picasso's Guernica)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: España: Historia Condensada; Al-Ándalus y la Herencia Árabe en el Español; 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos; Si Hubiera Nacido en España; A Brief History of France (this series)