Spain

From the crossroads of Iberia to a modern European democracy.

Spain's history is one of overlapping civilisations layered across the Iberian Peninsula. Celtic, Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian peoples gave way to six centuries of Roman Hispania and then to the Visigothic kingdom centred on Toledo. From 711 most of the peninsula fell under Muslim rule as Al-Andalus, whose Caliphate of Córdoba was among the most brilliant cultures of medieval Europe, even as Christian kingdoms in the north pressed a centuries-long Reconquista. The dynastic union of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, and their conquest of Granada in 1492, forged the core of a unified Spain that, with Columbus's voyage that same year, became the centre of a vast global empire and a Golden Age of art and letters. Imperial overreach, religious persecution through the Inquisition, and dynastic crisis brought long decline, the Bourbon succession and the trauma of the Napoleonic invasion. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the loss of empire, deep political instability, a devastating civil war and the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco, before Spain's peaceful transition to democracy and its 1978 constitution restored it as a parliamentary monarchy and a member of the European Union.