Spain Travel Guide 2026

Historical Heritage

Spain's history is one of Europe's most complex and dramatic — a story of conquest, religious upheaval, global empire, and artistic genius. The Iberian Peninsula was home to advanced Iberian and Celtic cultures before Carthaginian and then Roman conquest (from 218 BC), which gave the country Latin as a base for Spanish. The Visigoths arrived after Rome's fall, followed by the Umayyad Moorish invasion of 711 AD, which within seven years controlled almost all of the peninsula. The next 780 years — La Reconquista — were a slow Christian reconquest from the north, producing the extraordinary fusion of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures called Al-Andalus, whose jewels were Córdoba (at one point Europe's largest city), the Alhambra of Granada, and the Great Mosque of Córdoba. The Reconquista ended in 1492 — the same year Columbus reached the Americas and the same year the Jews were expelled from Spain — a confluence of events that launched Spain into a global empire spanning the Americas, Philippines, and parts of Africa. 16th-century Spain was the world's superpower, its silver from the Americas funding Velázquez, Cervantes, and El Greco in a cultural Golden Age. Decline followed: the Armada's defeat in 1588, Napoleonic invasion, Latin American independence, and finally the devastating Civil War (1936–39) and Franco's 40-year dictatorship ended only in 1975. Spain's rapid democratisation and economic modernisation after 1975 and EU membership in 1986 completed one of the 20th century's most impressive national reinventions.