The Iberian Peninsula holds some of the oldest evidence of human presence in Europe: at the Atapuerca range in Burgos, hominid remains more than eight hundred thousand years old have been found, among them Homo antecessor. Tens of thousands of years later, around 15.000 BC, Palaeolithic hunters painted the famous polychrome bison in the cave of Altamira, in Cantabria — a masterpiece of rock art that, when it was made public in 1880, many refused to believe was prehistoric. Altamira, today a World Heritage site, became the emblem of European Ice Age art.
In the first millennium BC the peninsula was home to a mosaic of peoples. The eastern and southern halves were inhabited by the Iberians, urban and hierarchical societies that minted coins, wrote in a language still not fully deciphered and left behind admirable sculptures such as the Lady of Elche. On the meseta and in the northwest, peoples of Celtic stock predominated; the contact between the two worlds is usually described as 'Celtiberian' culture. They formed no political unity: they were tribes and cities that traded with one another and fought one another.
The eastern Mediterranean soon arrived on those coasts. The Phoenicians, seafarers from what is now Lebanon, founded around 1100 BC — according to tradition — Gadir, today's Cádiz, considered the oldest city in Western Europe, along with a network of trading posts across the south. The Greeks followed, establishing colonies such as Emporion (Ampurias) on the Catalan coast. Out of that trade in metals — silver, copper, tin — came the brilliance of Tartessos, a semi-legendary civilisation of the lower Guadalquivir, immensely rich in metals, which ancient texts describe as a fabulous kingdom and which was the first documented high culture of the West on the peninsula.
In the third century BC the peninsula was caught in the struggle between the two great powers of the Mediterranean. Carthage, heir to Phoenician trade, extended its rule across the south and the eastern seaboard and founded Cartago Nova (Cartagena) as the base of its power; from there Hannibal Barca launched, after the siege of Saguntum, the Second Punic War against Rome (218-201 BC). The Carthaginian defeat handed Hispania to the Romans, who nonetheless took two centuries to control it completely: indigenous resistance was fierce, with legendary episodes such as the long war waged by the Lusitanian chieftain Viriathus or the siege and destruction of Numantia in 133 BC.
The conquest was completed under the emperor Augustus, with the Cantabrian Wars (29-19 BC). From then on Hispania became one of the most Romanised and prosperous provinces of the Empire. It was covered with roads, aqueducts, theatres, bridges and cities; Latin was imposed, and from it come Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician and the rest of the peninsula's Romance languages; Roman law arrived, and over the centuries so did Christianity. The aqueduct of Segovia, the theatre at Mérida, the walls of Lugo and the ruins of Itálica and Tarraco still bear witness to that legacy.
Hispania was not only a rich province: it gave Rome some of its most illustrious names. The emperors Trajan — under whom the Empire reached its greatest extent — and Hadrian were both born on Hispanic soil, at Itálica near Sevilla, as was Theodosius. And from Córdoba came Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and tutor of Nero, along with his nephew, the poet Lucan. Latin, Roman law, the urban network and the first Christianisation are the most enduring legacy of those six Roman centuries.
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire dragged Hispania down with it. At the start of the fifth century various Germanic peoples entered the peninsula — Suebi, Vandals, Alans — and shortly afterwards the Visigoths, an already deeply Romanised people who at first acted as allies (foederati) of Rome. Pushed out of Gaul after their defeat by the Franks at Vouillé (507), the Visigoths ended up making Hispania the centre of their kingdom, with their capital at Toledo.
The Visigothic kingdom of Toledo was the first attempt to unify the whole peninsula politically under a single power. Kings such as Leovigild subdued the Suebi of the northwest and much of the rebel territory. A decisive step was the conversion of King Reccared to Catholicism at the Third Council of Toledo (589), which abandoned the Goths' Arianism and united the Germanic ruling minority with the Hispano-Roman majority in a single faith. The councils of Toledo became assemblies of enormous political and religious weight, and that world produced a towering intellectual figure: Saint Isidore of Sevilla, whose Etymologies were an encyclopaedia of knowledge read across medieval Europe.
It was, however, a fragile kingdom. The monarchy was elective and was torn apart by conspiracies and civil wars between noble factions. That internal weakness proved fatal: around 710, a succession dispute between the supporters of King Roderic and those of the deposed Wittiza opened the door to the intervention of a Muslim army from North Africa. The defeat and death of Roderic at the battle of Guadalete, in 711, brought down the Visigothic monarchy within a few years and changed the course of the peninsula's history entirely.
In the year 711 an army led by Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the strait and defeated King Roderic. In barely seven years the Muslims — Arabs and Berbers — controlled almost the whole peninsula, which came to be called al-Ándalus. At first it was a distant province of the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus, governed by emirs. The turning point came in 756, when Abd al-Rahman I, a survivor of the massacre of his family by the Abbasids, took refuge in Córdoba and founded an independent Umayyad emirate. In 929 his descendant Abd al-Rahman III took the decisive step and proclaimed himself caliph, breaking every link with the East: the Caliphate of Córdoba was born.
Under the caliphate, between the tenth and eleventh centuries, Córdoba was the largest and most cultivated city in Western Europe, with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, paved streets, street lighting, baths, the great Mosque and the palace city of Medina Azahara. Its libraries held tens of thousands of volumes at a time when barely anyone read in the Christian kingdoms; in them medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy and poetry flourished, with later figures such as the philosopher Averroes and the Jewish thinker Maimonides, both from Córdoba. This is the famous image of the coexistence of the three cultures — Muslim, Jewish and Christian (Mozarab) — which was real and intensely fertile, but which should not be idealised: society was hierarchical, Jews and Christians lived as dhimmis subject to a tax and to restrictions, and there were also episodes of intolerance and persecution. It was productive coexistence, not modern equality.
The caliphate collapsed into civil war (the fitna) at the beginning of the eleventh century and in 1031 broke apart into some twenty small kingdoms, the taifas: cultivated but weak and often at odds with one another. That weakness favoured the Christian advance: the fall of Toledo to Alfonso VI (1085) alarmed the Andalusi Muslims, who called for help from two Berber empires in North Africa. First the Almoravids and then the Almohads crossed the strait, reunified al-Ándalus by force and imposed a far more rigorist religiosity. But their momentum broke at the great defeat of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), after which Muslim power fell back until, from the thirteenth century, it was reduced to the single Nasrid kingdom of Granada.
While al-Ándalus shone in the south, small Christian nuclei took shape in the northern mountains, where Muslim rule had barely reached. Tradition places the starting point at the battle of Covadonga (around 722), where the chieftain Pelayo held off a Muslim expedition; from that Asturian core came the kingdom of Asturias, later moved to León. Over the Middle Ages several kingdoms formed and reshaped themselves: León, Castile, Navarre, Aragón, the county and later principality of Catalonia and the kingdom of Portugal, each with its own institutions, its charters and its own dynamic.
For centuries these kingdoms expanded southwards at the expense of Muslim territory, in a long, discontinuous process far less epic than it was later made out to be. It was not a permanent crusade or a continuous war of religion: there were long stretches of peace, pacts, tribute payments (parias), alliances between Christian and Muslim kings against other Christian or Muslim kings, and a porous frontier where people of the three religions lived side by side. Figures such as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, served Christian and Muslim lords alike.
One important point is worth clarifying: the term 'Reconquista' is itself a late invention. It was not used in the Middle Ages; it was popularised in the nineteenth century, in the thick of nation-state building and under the influence of Romanticism and national Catholicism, in order to present eight centuries of history as a single unified feat of recovering an essential, eternal Christian Spain. Historians today regard it as an ideological and anachronistic concept that projects backwards an idea of nation that did not then exist. That is why people now speak cautiously of 'the so-called Reconquista': it describes an outcome — the disappearance of Muslim political power on the peninsula in 1492 — but it distorts the far more complex reality of the centuries that preceded it.
The marriage in 1469 of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón joined the two most powerful crowns on the peninsula in a dynastic union — not yet a unified state, since each kingdom kept its own laws and institutions — and opened a decisive era. The Catholic Monarchs, as they were known, strengthened royal power, brought the unruly nobility to heel and prepared the final assault on the last Muslim stronghold. On 2 January 1492, after a long war, King Boabdil surrendered Granada: the Nasrid kingdom was extinguished, and with it almost eight centuries of Islamic political presence on the peninsula.
That same crowded year had two other enormous consequences. On 31 March 1492 the monarchs signed the Edict of Granada in the Alhambra, ordering the Jews to convert to Christianity or leave their kingdoms within a few months. It was the end of the oldest and largest Jewish community in Europe: historians' estimates of the number expelled vary widely, usually within a range of some 40.000 to 100.000 people, a figure that authors such as Ladero Quesada have tended to revise downwards from older calculations. Those Sephardim scattered across the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, keeping their language, Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, alive for centuries. The decree was not formally repealed until 1968.
And in October 1492, after years of persistence, the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus, financed by the Crown of Castile, reached a Caribbean island believing he had arrived in Asia. That voyage began European expansion across the Americas and turned Castile into the core of an empire on a scale never seen before. Within a few decades, discovery and conquest would transform the world economy, the diet of entire continents and the lives — often tragically — of millions of people on both sides of the ocean.
In 1478 the Catholic Monarchs obtained papal authorisation to create their own Inquisition, controlled by the Crown rather than directly by Rome. Its declared purpose was to police religious orthodoxy, and in particular to pursue conversos — Jews and, later, Muslims who had converted to Christianity — suspected of secretly practising their former faith. The Holy Office was organised into tribunals across the territory, with secret proceedings, the use of torture to extract confessions and sentences carried out at public ceremonies, the autos-da-fé.
The Spanish Inquisition operated for more than three and a half centuries, until its definitive abolition in 1834. It went after crypto-Jews, Moriscos, Protestants, mystics and people accused of blasphemy, bigamy or witchcraft, and it also enforced a rigid censorship of books and ideas that, according to many historians, contributed to Spain's intellectual isolation from modern Europe. It was also a powerful instrument of social control and of imposed religious uniformity.
Much of the so-called 'black legend' was built around it from the sixteenth century onwards: the image of a fanatical, bloodthirsty Spain spread by its political and religious rivals. Recent historiography has qualified the figures: studies of the surviving records calculate that the number of people sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition over its entire existence runs to several thousand — far from the tens or hundreds of thousands of the legend — although its capacity to instil fear, control consciences and censor thought was much greater than those figures suggest. Neither Europe's singular monster, as the black legend would have it, nor a benevolent institution, as a certain apologetic reaction claimed: it was an exceptional tribunal in the service of orthodoxy and power.
With the grandson of the Catholic Monarchs, Charles I of Spain and V of Germany, the Hispanic monarchy became the leading world power: it brought together Castile, Aragón, the Low Countries, much of Italy, the German Empire and, above all, an American domain expanding at dizzying speed. His son Philip II reigned over an empire 'on which the sun never set' and fixed the capital in Madrid in 1561. It was an age of grandeur and of ceaseless wars — against France, against the Ottoman Empire (with the naval victory at Lepanto in 1571), against the Protestant rebels of Flanders and against Elizabeth I's England, where the Invincible Armada failed in 1588 — financed largely with American silver.
The conquest of the Americas is one of the largest and most terrible chapters of this history, and it deserves to be told without the two usual distortions. Neither the 'black legend', which reduces it to a deliberate genocide and denies all complexity, nor the 'rose-tinted legend', which presents it as an almost benevolent civilising enterprise, does justice to the facts. What happened was a rapid military conquest — Cortés over the Aztec empire (1519-1521), Pizarro over the Inca (1532-1533) — accompanied by a demographic catastrophe of colossal proportions: the indigenous population collapsed, above all from epidemics of smallpox, measles and other diseases against which they had no defences, but also from violence, forced labour in mines and encomiendas, and displacement. At the same time there was an intense moral debate within Spain itself: Friar Bartolomé de las Casas denounced the abuses, the New Laws of 1542 attempted — with little success — to protect indigenous people, and the Valladolid debate (1550-1551) openly discussed the legitimacy of the conquest. There was also enormous racial mixing and the spread of Castilian Spanish and Catholicism. All of it coexisted: evangelisation and exploitation, the law of nations and slavery, the founding of universities and the plundering of the silver of Potosí.
Alongside imperial expansion came the Golden Age of Spanish arts and letters. Cervantes published Don Quixote (1605-1615), the first modern novel; Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina filled the theatres; Quevedo and Góngora renewed poetry; and in painting El Greco, Velázquez — with Las Meninas — and Murillo shone. That cultural peak coincided, paradoxically, with the beginning of political decline. Under the last Habsburgs, above all Philip IV and Charles II, wars ruined the treasury, rebellions followed one another and the Portuguese revolt ended in independence (1640-1668). Added to that picture was the expulsion of the Moriscos decreed by Philip III in 1609: some 300.000 descendants of converted Muslims, many of them fully integrated, were forced to leave Spain — the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragón were hit hardest — at a brutal human and economic cost to entire regions.
The death of Charles II without an heir in 1700 set off the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), a European conflict over the throne of Madrid between the French candidate, Philip of Anjou — grandson of Louis XIV — and Archduke Charles of Austria. Philip won, the first king of the Bourbon dynasty, which still reigns. His triumph had a deep internal consequence: the Nueva Planta decrees abolished the charters and institutions of the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragón — Aragón, Valencia, Catalonia, Mallorca — which had backed the archduke, and imposed a centralist model on the French pattern. The Bourbon eighteenth century, above all under Charles III, was a time of Enlightenment reform, public works and a degree of economic recovery.
It all broke apart at the start of the nineteenth century. In 1808 Napoleon, exploiting the intrigues of the royal family (the Aranjuez mutiny, the abdications at Bayonne), placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. The popular reaction was immediate: the uprising of 2 May 1808 in Madrid, immortalised by Goya, ignited the Peninsular War (1808-1814), a brutal conflict — the very word 'guerrilla' comes from it — fought with British support and ending in French withdrawal. In the middle of the fighting, the Cortes assembled in Cádiz proclaimed in 1812 the first Spanish constitution, 'La Pepa', liberal in character, which marked the birth of Hispanic constitutionalism.
The Spanish nineteenth century was turbulent: the return of absolutism under Ferdinand VII, the Carlist wars between liberals and traditionalists, military coups, a short-lived First Republic (1873-1874) and permanent instability. And it was, above all, the century in which the empire was lost. Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the Napoleonic war, the American colonies became independent one after another between 1810 and 1825, with figures such as Bolívar and San Martín at the head. The final blow came in 1898, when defeat by the United States cost Spain its last overseas possessions — Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. That 'Disaster of '98' provoked a deep crisis of national conscience that gave its name to an entire generation of writers and intellectuals.
After the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the erosion of the monarchy, the municipal elections of April 1931 led to the proclamation of the Second Republic. It was a reformist democratic regime that brought in women's suffrage, land reform, public schooling, the separation of Church and state and the first statutes of autonomy. But it was also a time of extreme political and social polarisation, between a right that feared revolution and a left that was often divided, with violent episodes such as the Asturian revolt of 1934.
On 18 July 1936 a military coup led by part of the army against the Popular Front government partially failed and, instead of a quick victory, triggered the Civil War (1936-1939). It was an atrocious conflict and also a rehearsal for the Second World War: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the rebel side with men and weapons — the Condor Legion bombed Gernika in 1937, a scene Picasso turned into a universal icon — while the Soviet Union and the International Brigades of volunteers from around the world supported the Republic, abandoned by the Western democracies. There was repression and there were massacres behind the lines on both sides. The war ended on 1 April 1939 with the victory of General Francisco Franco.
Almost four decades of dictatorship followed. Francoism was an authoritarian, national-Catholic, single-party regime that harshly repressed the defeated. The question of the victims must be handled precisely and without false balance: historical research calculates that Francoist repression — executions during and above all after the war — caused in the order of 150.000 deaths, and Spain is today one of the countries in the world with the most unidentified disappeared in mass graves, with thousands of graves recorded and tens of thousands of people still not recovered. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards went into exile; many Republicans ended up in Nazi concentration camps. There was political and cultural repression that targeted the Catalan, Basque and Galician languages and identities. Over time, and especially from the 1960s, the dictatorship shifted towards economic development and an opening to tourism, but it kept its repressive character to the very end: as late as 1975, the year Franco died, death sentences were carried out for political reasons.
Franco died on 20 November 1975. Two days later Juan Carlos I was proclaimed king, initially as the regime's designated successor. Under his reign, however, and with figures such as prime minister Adolfo Suárez, the Transition got under way: the move from dictatorship to democracy through negotiated reform rather than rupture. Political parties were legalised, the Communist Party included; the first free elections were held in 1977; and in 1978 Spaniards approved by referendum a constitution enshrining a parliamentary monarchy, pluralism and a decentralised model, the 'State of Autonomies'. The Transition was admired as a model, though the price it carried is debated critically today, above all the 1977 Amnesty Law, which left the crimes of Francoism unpunished.
The young democracy came through serious moments, such as the attempted coup of 23 February 1981, when a group of Civil Guards stormed the Congress; its failure consolidated the system. Spain joined NATO (1982) and the European Economic Community (1986), and went through rapid modernisation, symbolised by the year 1992, with the Barcelona Olympic Games and the Universal Exposition in Sevilla. Alternation between the PSOE and the Partido Popular structured political life until the economic crisis of 2008 and a run of corruption cases opened the way to a more fragmented landscape.
Spanish democracy has lived alongside deep territorial tensions. For decades the terrorist organisation ETA, which emerged in the late Franco years with the goal of an independent Euskal Herria, killed more than 850 people in a campaign of attacks, kidnappings and extortion that only ended for good with the announcement of the end of violence in 2011 and the group's dissolution in 2018. In Catalonia, the rise of the independence movement culminated in the illegal referendum and the declaration of independence of October 2017, met by the state with the application of the constitution and judicial proceedings, in a crisis that still shapes Spanish politics. In 2014 Juan Carlos I abdicated in favour of his son Felipe VI. Spain today is a consolidated democracy integrated into the European Union, still debating how to accommodate the plurality of its territories and how to settle accounts with its historical memory.
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Andalusia, watered by the Guadalquivir, was one of the first civilised lands of the West. In the lower valley of the river, in the first millennium BC, Tartessos flourished: a culture immensely rich in metals that traded with Phoenicians and Greeks and which ancient sources wrapped in an almost legendary aura. The Phoenicians had founded Gadir (Cádiz) on the coast, considered the oldest city in Western Europe, along with a network of trading posts all along the shore.
With the Roman conquest, the south became the province of Baetica, one of the richest, most populous and most Romanised in the whole Empire. It exported olive oil, wine, garum (fish sauce) and metals to Rome, and its cities reached great splendour. Baetica produced some of Rome's biggest names: the emperors Trajan and Hadrian were born at Itálica, next to today's Sevilla, where the amphitheatre and mosaics survive; and the philosopher Seneca came from Córdoba.
That condition of a fertile, prosperous land open to the Mediterranean, a crossroads between Europe and Africa, would mark the whole later history of Andalusia. On the Iberian, Phoenician and Roman substratum would later come the Visigoths and, above all, the eight centuries of al-Ándalus, which made the south of the peninsula the heart of Islamic civilisation in Europe.
No city embodies the splendour of al-Ándalus better than Córdoba. Made capital of the independent Umayyad emirate by Abd al-Rahman I in 756 and raised to the seat of the caliphate by Abd al-Rahman III in 929, Córdoba was, through the tenth and eleventh centuries, the largest, richest and most cultivated city in Western Europe. It has been estimated to have passed a quarter of a million inhabitants at a time when Christian capitals were villages; it had paved streets, baths, markets and libraries holding tens of thousands of volumes.
Its supreme monument is the Mosque, begun by Abd al-Rahman I in the eighth century and enlarged several times, a forest of columns and two-tone arches of overwhelming beauty. After the Christian conquest of the city by Ferdinand III in 1236, a cathedral was built inside it, so that today it is the Mezquita-Catedral, a symbol of the layering of cultures that defines Andalusia. A few kilometres away, the ruins of Medina Azahara, the dazzling palace city built by Abd al-Rahman III, testify to the luxury of the caliphate.
Córdoba was also an intellectual centre of the first order, birthplace of two of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages: the Muslim philosopher Averroes, commentator on Aristotle, whose work decisively influenced Christian Europe, and the Jewish scholar Maimonides, one of the peaks of Hebrew thought. That scientific and philosophical legacy, transmitted through translations, was one of the great contributions of al-Ándalus to world culture.
After the fall of the caliphate, Andalusia was the stage for the successive empires that tried to reunify al-Ándalus. Under the Almohads, in the twelfth century, Sevilla enjoyed a period of great splendour as the empire's peninsular capital: from that time comes the Giralda, minaret of the great Almohad mosque that later became the bell tower of the Christian cathedral, today the city's emblem and one of the most famous towers in the world. Sevilla was conquered by Ferdinand III of Castile in 1248.
The last redoubt of Muslim power on the peninsula was the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, which survived for more than two and a half centuries, from the middle of the thirteenth century until 1492, paying tribute to Castile and playing its alliances shrewdly. In that long twilight, the Nasrid dynasty built on the Alhambra hill one of the most beautiful palace complexes ever raised: a labyrinth of courtyards, fountains, gardens and halls covered in plasterwork, muqarnas and inscriptions, with the Court of the Lions and the Generalife as its jewels. The Alhambra is the supreme work of Andalusi art and one of the most visited monuments in Spain.
The capture of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs on 2 January 1492 ended the Nasrid kingdom and the political presence of Islam on the peninsula. The terms of surrender promised respect for the religion and customs of Granada's Muslims, but those guarantees were soon broken: forced conversions, the revolts in the Alpujarras and, finally, the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 brought that long history to a tragic close. Beneath the Albaicín and the Alhambra, the memory of al-Ándalus still beats.
The discovery of the Americas opened a chapter of dazzling wealth for Andalusia, and for Sevilla in particular. In 1503 the Crown established the Casa de Contratación in Sevilla, the body that held a monopoly over all trade with the Indies: every ship, every cargo, every emigrant and, above all, every consignment of gold and silver arriving from the Americas had to pass through its river port, the only authorised one. Sevilla thus became the 'port and gateway to the Indies' and one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe.
Through the sixteenth century and much of the seventeenth, the city lived a golden age: it filled with merchants from all over Europe, with bankers, artists and people who had come to seek their fortune. The Indies fleet sailed and returned each year, and up the Guadalquivir came the silver of the Cerro Rico at Potosí and the gold of the Indies. That splendour left an enormous monumental and artistic mark, with painters such as Murillo and Zurbarán, and an architecture of churches, palaces and the cathedral itself — the largest Gothic church in the world — alongside the Archivo de Indias, which still guards the documentary memory of the empire.
That trade had its dark side too: it was part of a global economy built on forced indigenous labour and on the African slave trade, which likewise passed through Andalusian ports. In time, the progressive silting of the Guadalquivir and commercial convenience led to the monopoly being moved to Cádiz in 1717. The bay of Cádiz took over as the great American port in the eighteenth century, and out of that cosmopolitanism came, not by chance, the liberal constitution of 1812.
Flamenco, Andalusia's most universal art form, was born of the meeting of the cultures that peopled the south. At its core is the contribution of the Roma people, who reached the peninsula at the start of the fifteenth century and who over the centuries fused their own sensibility with Andalusian musical traditions — themselves rooted in Arab, Jewish, Castilian and, later, American sources — in the areas of Sevilla, Cádiz, Jerez and Granada. The word 'flamenco' began to be used in the eighteenth century, associated precisely with Roma-Andalusian culture.
Flamenco is built on three elements: the cante (the voice), the toque (the guitar) and the baile (the dance), organised into palos or styles — soleá, seguiriya, bulerías, tangos, fandangos — each with its own rhythm and character. It began as intimate music, born in the forge and at gatherings, tied to the marginalisation and suffering of the Roma people and of Andalusia's poor, which is why many of its deepest songs, the so-called cante jondo, express pain, grief and death with shattering intensity.
In the nineteenth century flamenco moved onto the stage with the cafés cantantes, venues where performers turned professional and competed against one another, such as the one opened by the legendary Silverio Franconetti in Sevilla. The twentieth century brought legendary figures, from the singer Camarón de la Isla to the guitarist Paco de Lucía, who took the art to its highest peaks and opened it up to fusion with jazz and other music. In 2010 UNESCO listed flamenco as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising an art that remains, above all, the living voice of Andalusia.
Mediterranean Andalusia has in Málaga one of its oldest and most vital cities. Founded by the Phoenicians as Malaka around the eighth century BC, it was a Phoenician, Roman and Andalusi port — its Alcazaba and the Gibralfaro castle look down over the city — before its conquest by the Catholic Monarchs in 1487. In modern times it was a pioneering commercial and industrial port, and in the twentieth century it established itself as the capital of the Costa del Sol and of tourism. Málaga is also the birthplace of Pablo Picasso, the most influential painter of the twentieth century, to whom a museum and his birth house are dedicated.
Inland, the Andalusian sierra hides the so-called pueblos blancos, the white villages: whitewashed houses clinging to the hillsides, a legacy of Andalusi settlement and of the frontier between the Nasrid kingdom and Castile. The most spectacular is Ronda, split in two by a dizzying gorge spanned by the famous eighteenth-century Puente Nuevo. Ronda was an important Muslim city, capital of a taifa, and it keeps its Andalusi old town perched above the precipice.
Ronda also holds a special place in the history of bullfighting: its bullring, one of the oldest in Spain, is associated with the rondeña school and with the Romero dynasty, who in the eighteenth century helped fix the rules of modern bullfighting on foot. Its dramatic landscape and romantic atmosphere seduced foreign travellers and writers, from the Romantic travellers of the nineteenth century to Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, who loved the town and helped spread its legend around the world.
Catalonia was born on a frontier. After the Muslim conquest, the Carolingian empire of Charlemagne and his successors pushed south of the Pyrenees and organised, at the beginning of the ninth century, a defensive zone known as the Marca Hispanica, divided into counties dependent on the Frankish kings: Barcelona, Girona, Urgell, Empúries and others. Much of Catalonia's historical character comes from that frontier origin.
Over time the counts of Barcelona imposed themselves on the rest and gained de facto independence from Frankish kings who were ever more remote. Tradition credits Wilfred the Hairy (Guifré el Pilós), count in the late ninth century, with founding the comital dynasty that consolidated that autonomous power. At the end of the tenth century, Count Borrell II stopped renewing the bond of vassalage with the Franks, a moment Catalan historiography has taken as symbolic of the birth of a Catalonia of its own.
Those counties developed institutions, a law of their own — the Usatges of Barcelona — and a Romance language, Catalan, related to the Occitan spoken on the other side of the Pyrenees. Around Barcelona a political and cultural space took shape which, without yet being a state in the modern sense, laid the foundations of the Catalan identity that would unfold with the later union with Aragón.
In 1137 the marriage of Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona, to Petronila, heiress of the kingdom of Aragón, joined both territories in what is known as the Crown of Aragón: not a unitary state but a confederation of kingdoms and territories — Aragón, the principality of Catalonia, and later Valencia, Mallorca and Italian possessions — that shared a monarch while each kept its own laws, parliaments and institutions. It was a contractual model, in which the king had to swear to respect each territory's charters.
The Crown of Aragón became a great maritime and commercial power in the Mediterranean. In the thirteenth century, James I the Conqueror took the Balearic Islands (1229) and the kingdom of Valencia (1238) from the Muslims. The Crown then projected its power eastwards: it conquered Sicily and Sardinia, intervened in Naples and even reached Greece with the Almogavars, founding the duchies of Athens and Neopatria. Barcelona, with its Llotja and its consulate of the sea and its famous maritime law, was one of the great trading hubs of the age.
Valencia, incorporated as a kingdom in its own right, flourished above all in the fifteenth century, its Valencian 'Golden Age', with a powerful economy, the Llotja de la Seda silk exchange — today a World Heritage site — and a first-rank literature in Catalan, with authors such as Ausiàs March and Joanot Martorell, author of Tirant lo Blanch. That brilliant Mediterranean chapter left a deep mark on the identity, the language and the urban fabric of the whole eastern seaboard of the peninsula.
Catalan is a Romance language born, like Castilian, from the evolution of Latin, but in the area of the old Pyrenean counties. In the Middle Ages it was a language of culture, chancery and literature across the whole Crown of Aragón, from Catalonia to Valencia and the Balearics, with figures as important as the Mallorcan philosopher and mystic Ramon Llull, considered one of the creators of Catalan prose.
After the dynastic union of the crowns and, above all, after the Nueva Planta decrees of the eighteenth century, Catalan lost its status as an official and administrative language, though it remained the living language of most of the population. Its recovery as a literary and learned language came in the nineteenth century with the Renaixença, a cultural movement that, in step with European Romanticism, reclaimed the Catalan language, history and traditions, with figures such as the poet Jacint Verdaguer. From it, by the end of the nineteenth century, political Catalanism would also emerge.
In the twentieth century the Catalan language went through stages of recognition — the statutes of autonomy of the Second Republic — and of harsh repression, especially under the Franco dictatorship, which banned its official and public use. With democracy and the statutes of autonomy of Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearics, Catalan — called Valencian in the Valencian Community — regained its status as a co-official language, was normalised in schools and the media, and is today one of the pillars of identity in these territories.
In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), Catalonia and the rest of the Crown of Aragón mostly sided with the Austrian candidate, Archduke Charles, against the Bourbon Philip of Anjou, fearing the French-style centralism the latter represented. The defeat of the Austracist side was also the defeat of these territories' own liberties and institutions.
The climactic episode was the siege of Barcelona, which held out for more than a year until it fell on 11 September 1714 to the troops of Philip V. That date eventually became the Diada, Catalonia's national day, commemorating the defeat and the institutions that were lost. It is worth being precise, against simplistic readings: this was not a war of Catalonia against Spain but a European succession conflict in which Catalans, Valencians and Aragonese fought on both sides — although the outcome did have specific and very serious consequences for the Crown of Aragón.
After his victory, Philip V issued the Nueva Planta decrees (for Valencia and Aragón in 1707, for Mallorca and Catalonia in 1715-1716), which abolished the charters, parliaments and self-governing institutions of these kingdoms and imposed the laws and institutions of Castile along with a centralised administrative model. The Generalitat was suppressed, the University of Barcelona was closed and Catalan was pushed out of the administration. That loss of historic liberties lies at the root of much of contemporary Catalan political memory and imagination.
Catalonia was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in Spain. From the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, the cotton textile industry turned Barcelona and the valleys of the Catalan rivers into the country's first great manufacturing centre, with its industrial colonies, its chimneys and a new working class. That economic drive, combined with the cultural Renaixença, fed the emergence of political Catalanism and, at the same time, of a strong labour and anarcho-syndicalist movement that would make Barcelona a city of intense social conflict.
Bourgeois prosperity left a unique artistic mark: Catalan Modernisme, the local version of Art Nouveau, which transformed Barcelona's Eixample at the start of the twentieth century. Its greatest figure was Antoni Gaudí, author of the Sagrada Família, Casa Batlló, La Pedrera and Park Güell, today World Heritage sites, alongside architects such as Domènech i Montaner. Barcelona showed itself off at the universal expositions of 1888 and 1929, and the city sealed its place in the world with the 1992 Olympic Games.
In the twentieth century Catalonia experienced autonomy under the Second Republic, the revolution and repression of the Civil War, and then the harsh persecution of its language and identity under Francoism. With the Generalitat restored under democracy, it has been one of Spain's most dynamic regions, but also the setting for the greatest recent territorial tension: the rise of the independence movement culminated in the illegal referendum and declaration of independence of October 2017, met by the state with judicial and constitutional measures, in a conflict that remains open and that divides Catalan society itself.
Central Spain is the meseta, a great high plateau of wide horizons, harsh winters and blazing summers, split by the Sistema Central mountains into two halves. On that rough ground Castile was forged, its name — 'land of castles' — referring to the fortresses that studded the frontier of that eastern march of the kingdom of León in the ninth and tenth centuries. From a dependent county, Castile became an independent kingdom and, in time, the political engine of Christian expansion southwards.
Those lands also produced the language now spoken by hundreds of millions of people. Castilian was born as a Romance dialect in the area of Burgos and La Rioja, and the earliest written traces — the Glosas Emilianenses, from the monastery of San Millán — date from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Castile's political power, its role on the frontier and later the weight of the court and the empire turned that local speech into the common language of the monarchy and, later still, into the Spanish that spread across the Americas.
Old Castile, north of the Sistema Central (Burgos, Valladolid, Segovia, Ávila, Salamanca), and New Castile to the south (Toledo, Madrid, Cuenca, Guadalajara), were the territorial core around which the Hispanic monarchy was built. Cities such as Valladolid served as capital, and the choice of Madrid as the permanent seat of the court in the sixteenth century finally made the meseta the country's political centre of gravity.
Perched on a crag almost entirely encircled by the river Tagus, Toledo is one of the great living museums of Spanish history. It was capital of the Visigothic kingdom, and its councils shaped the political and religious life of that era. After the Muslim conquest it became an important city of al-Ándalus, and in 1085 it was taken by Alfonso VI of León and Castile, a milestone of enormous symbolic and strategic value.
Under Christian rule, Toledo became the best example of coexistence between Christians, Muslims (Mudéjars) and Jews — and of its limits. The city still has churches, mosques and synagogues, some converted from one into another, such as the synagogues of Santa María la Blanca and El Tránsito. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the famous Toledo School of Translators flourished, rendering Greek, Arabic and Hebrew works of philosophy, medicine and science into Latin and Castilian, a decisive intellectual bridge between the Islamic world and Christian Europe.
Primatial see of the Spanish Church and capital until Philip II moved the court to Madrid in 1561, Toledo was left as a city of art frozen in time, which is today its greatest asset. El Greco lived and painted here; his Burial of the Count of Orgaz can be seen in the church of Santo Tomé. The whole historic centre, a World Heritage site, is a maze of narrow streets where the traces of the three cultures that inhabited it lie one on top of another.
Unlike other great European capitals, Madrid owes its rank neither to an imperial Roman past nor to a great medieval see, but to a political decision. It was a town of Muslim origin — its name comes from the Arabic Mayrit — taken by Castile in the eleventh century and of middling importance, when in 1561 Philip II decided to install the court there permanently. Its central position on the peninsula and the wish for a capital free of the weight of other local powers both counted in the choice.
From then on Madrid grew as capital of the monarchy. Under the Habsburgs, the Madrid de los Austrias took shape, with the Plaza Mayor and the Habsburg quarter; the eighteenth-century Bourbons gave it a more monumental air, with the Royal Palace built after the old alcázar burned down, the Paseo del Prado and the great Enlightenment institutions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the city expanded with new districts, the Gran Vía and the ensanches, until it became the large metropolis it is today.
Madrid was also the stage for pivotal moments in national history: the uprising of 2 May 1808 against the French, the Republican resistance during the long siege of the Civil War (1936-1939) and the attempted coup of 23 February 1981. Today it is the country's political, economic and cultural capital, and home to one of the greatest museum clusters in the world: the 'golden triangle of art' of the Prado, the Reina Sofía — where Picasso's Guernica hangs — and the Thyssen-Bornemisza.
A little over forty kilometres from Madrid, at the foot of the Guadarrama mountains, stands the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the building that best sums up the spirit of the Hispanic monarchy at its height. Philip II had it built between 1563 and 1584, fulfilling a vow made after the victory over France at the battle of Saint-Quentin (1557), which was fought on Saint Lawrence's day. The architects Juan Bautista de Toledo and, above all, Juan de Herrera gave form to a colossal granite building of sober, geometric lines that defined a style of its own, the 'Herrerian'.
El Escorial is many things at once: monastery, basilica, royal palace, pantheon, library and museum. It concentrates in a single complex the twin religious and political vocation of the Habsburg monarchy. Its library gathered thousands of manuscripts and volumes; its basilica and pantheon hold the remains of almost every Spanish monarch since Charles I. From his austere study, Philip II governed a planetary empire by correspondence, in the heart of the Castilian meseta.
More than a mere palace, El Escorial was conceived as a symbol of the power of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and of Spain's central role in the defence of the faith. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it remains one of the most impressive monuments of the European Renaissance and the finest expression in stone of the Habsburgs' imperial and religious project.
On the Castilian meseta, two cities sum up much of its history. Segovia preserves the most impressive standing work of Roman Hispania: its aqueduct, a colossal bridge of granite arches assembled without mortar, probably built in the late first or early second century to bring water into the city, and which went on doing its job for almost two thousand years. Below it, the medieval city culminates in the Alcázar, a castle with a fairy-tale silhouette that was a royal residence and where Isabella the Catholic was proclaimed queen of Castile in 1474.
Salamanca, for its part, is Spain's great university city. Its university, founded in 1218 by Alfonso IX of León, is one of the oldest in Europe and was for centuries one of the continent's great centres of learning; its lecture halls even hosted debate on the legitimacy of the conquest of the Americas and the rights of indigenous peoples, through what became known as the School of Salamanca. The Plateresque façade of the university, with its famous carved frog hidden among the reliefs, is one of the city's icons.
Built in the region's characteristic golden stone, which seems to catch fire at sunset, both cities have historic centres listed as World Heritage. Salamanca also has two cathedrals joined together — the old Romanesque one and the new Gothic-Baroque one — and one of the most harmonious main squares in Spain, an eighteenth-century work. Segovia, Salamanca and neighbouring Ávila, with its intact walls, form the monumental triangle of old Castile.
The Balearic Islands — Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera — were settled very early and preserve one of the most remarkable prehistoric legacies in the Mediterranean. In Mallorca and above all in Menorca, the Talayotic culture flourished in the Bronze and Iron Ages, raising thousands of stone monuments: the talayots (truncated conical towers), the taulas (great stone tables with a ritual function) and the navetas (collective tombs shaped like an upturned boat). That megalithic architecture of Menorca has been recognised as World Heritage.
Its inhabitants were famous in antiquity for one very particular military skill: the sling. The Balearic slingers, able to hurl stones with enormous precision and force, were feared and much sought after as mercenary troops, and fought in the service of Carthage and of Rome. From that reputation as slingers — in Greek, ballein, 'to throw' — one etymology derives the very name of the islands.
Ibiza had a singular fate. Founded by the Phoenicians and turned into an important Punic colony — Ebusus — around the seventh century BC, it was a major centre of Carthaginian trade in the western Mediterranean, with intense activity and an exceptional necropolis, Puig des Molins, today also World Heritage. The cult of deities such as Tanit left a deep mark on the island. After the Punic Wars, all the Balearics passed into Rome's orbit; Rome conquered them in 123 BC and drew them into its world.
Under Roman rule the Balearics went through centuries of Romanisation, with the founding of cities such as Palma and Pollentia in Mallorca. The fall of the Western Roman Empire brought the Vandals, who occupied the islands in the fifth century, and then their reconquest by the Byzantine Empire in the sixth, which kept them for a time within its Mediterranean orbit.
From the eighth and ninth centuries onwards, the Balearics were increasingly exposed to the new Mediterranean power: Islam. After centuries of raids, they were finally incorporated into al-Ándalus at the beginning of the tenth century, joining the emirate and then the caliphate of Córdoba. Mallorca — Mayurqa — and Ibiza — Yabisa — then lived through a long Andalusi period that left a deep mark on agriculture, with its irrigation systems and terraced fields, on place names and on the islands' material culture.
After the disintegration of the caliphate, the islands formed part of various taifas and became both a pirate base and, at one point, a small independent state. That Muslim Mayurqa, prosperous and well connected by sea, would be the target of the great military enterprise that changed the archipelago's destiny for good: the Catalan conquest of the thirteenth century.
The founding moment of the Christian and modern Balearics was the conquest of Mallorca by James I of Aragón. In September 1229 the young king landed at the head of a Catalan-Aragonese army and, after a hard campaign, took Madina Mayurqa — today's Palma — on 31 December 1229. The conquest brought the island into the Crown of Aragón and meant the replacement of the Andalusi population and culture by Christian settlers, mostly Catalans, whose language — Catalan in its Balearic variety, Mallorquín — took root and survives today.
James I, nicknamed 'the Conqueror' for it, went on to take Ibiza and Formentera (1235); Menorca, which at first remained a vassal Muslim kingdom, would be incorporated by Alfonso III in 1287. The division of the territory and the organisation of the new society were recorded in the Llibre del Repartiment. On his death, James I split his domains, and the Balearics, together with territories in southern France and Roussillon, formed a short-lived independent kingdom: the Kingdom of Mallorca (1276-1349).
That kingdom, with its capital in Palma, enjoyed a period of commercial and cultural splendour — the celebrated Mallorcan school of cartography, author of the Catalan Atlas, belongs to it — until it was forcibly reincorporated into the Crown of Aragón by Peter IV in 1349. The mark of that Gothic era is visible in the imposing cathedral of Palma, La Seu, raised beside the sea on the site of the old mosque, one of the great Gothic churches of the Mediterranean.
Sitting at the very heart of the western Mediterranean, on the route between the peninsula, Italy and North Africa, the Balearics lived for centuries under the constant threat of piracy. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, Barbary corsairs from North Africa and Ottoman Turks devastated the islands' coasts again and again, sacking villages, burning churches and capturing inhabitants to sell as slaves.
That insecurity deeply marked island life and landscape. Coastal settlements protected themselves with walls, and a whole system of watchtowers and defensive towers was built along the shoreline, from which fire and smoke signalled the arrival of enemy ships. Many villages withdrew inland, away from the dangerous coast. In Ibiza, the town was fortified with an impressive Renaissance walled enclosure, Dalt Vila, today a World Heritage site and one of the finest examples of Renaissance military architecture in the Mediterranean.
Menorca was a case apart: its excellent natural harbour at Mahón, one of the best in the Mediterranean, made it a prize coveted by the great powers. Through the eighteenth century the island passed from hand to hand and was held for a long period by Britain, which left a distinctive mark on it — from the layout of some settlements to a taste for gin — before its definitive return to Spain in 1802.
For much of the early modern period and the nineteenth century, the Balearics were a relatively poor and isolated land, given over to farming, fishing and emigration. Even in the nineteenth century they began to attract distinguished travellers drawn by their beauty and climate: the composer Frédéric Chopin and the writer George Sand spent the winter of 1838-1839 at the charterhouse of Valldemossa, in Mallorca, a stay that produced the famous book A Winter in Majorca.
But the great transformation came with mass tourism from the 1950s and 1960s. The climate, the beaches and the turquoise coves turned the islands into one of the first and largest tourist destinations in Europe. Mallorca, with Palma as its capital, filled with hotels and visitors; Palma airport is today one of the busiest in Spain. That tourist boom lifted the islands out of poverty and made them one of the most prosperous regions in the country, though also with severe pressure on land, water and landscape.
Ibiza followed its own very particular path. In the 1960s and 1970s it became a refuge for hippies and the international counterculture, drawn by its free and bohemian atmosphere, and from there it evolved into the world capital of electronic music and nightlife, with its legendary clubs. Alongside that party face, the island keeps its hidden coves, its white villages and the impressive walled old town of Dalt Vila. Menorca, quieter and more reserved, opted for a more sustainable model and was declared a Biosphere Reserve. The Balearics today are an autonomous community with a language of their own and a Mediterranean identity forged over three thousand years of history.
At the northern edge of the peninsula, between the Cantabrian Sea and the western Pyrenees, lives one of the oldest and most singular peoples in Europe: the Basques. Their most astonishing feature is the language, Euskera or Euskara, the only non-Indo-European language still surviving in Western Europe. It is unrelated to Latin or to any of the languages that arrived with the great Indo-European migrations; it is a pre-Indo-European tongue, spoken in these mountains before the arrival of Romans, Celts or Goths, and its origin remains a puzzle for linguists.
That continuity is partly explained by geography. Romanisation was shallower in these mountainous lands, and al-Ándalus never managed to control them in any stable way. In the Middle Ages the kingdom of Navarre (or Pamplona) emerged, which under Sancho III the Great, at the start of the eleventh century, became the most powerful in Christian Spain. The Basque territories — Álava, Biscay, Gipuzkoa and Navarre itself — kept their fueros for centuries, that is, their own laws and institutions and a broad autonomy within the monarchy.
The loss of those charters in the nineteenth century, after the Carlist wars, and the intense industrialisation and immigration that transformed the Basque Country fed, at the end of that century, the birth of Basque nationalism under Sabino Arana. Euskera, persecuted and pushed to the margins under Francoism, was recovered with democracy: today it is a co-official language in the Basque Country and part of Navarre, is taught in schools and stands as the most powerful symbol of a thousand-year-old identity.
Around the year 820, according to tradition, a tomb attributed to the apostle James the Great was discovered in a Galician wood. The place, Campus Stellae — 'field of the star', supposedly the origin of Compostela — became the seat of a cult that soon drew pilgrims from across Christendom. So began the Camino de Santiago, one of the three great pilgrimages of medieval Christianity, alongside Rome and Jerusalem.
Through the Middle Ages, tens of thousands of pilgrims a year walked the routes crossing the north of the peninsula to Santiago de Compostela. The Camino Francés, the busiest, filled with churches, hospitals, bridges and towns, and was an extraordinary channel for the movement of people, goods, ideas and art — Romanesque architecture spread along its stages. Santiago became a great spiritual and political centre, and over the apostle's tomb rose the cathedral, a Romanesque masterpiece completed centuries later with a spectacular Baroque façade, the Obradoiro, and the famous Pórtico de la Gloria by Master Mateo.
Galicia, a land with a language of its own — Galician, sibling to Portuguese — was a kingdom in the early Middle Ages and retains a strong cultural personality, with its green landscape, its rías and an intense Atlantic tradition. After centuries of decline, the Camino de Santiago revived strongly in the last decades of the twentieth century and is today a global phenomenon that draws hundreds of thousands of walkers every year, religious and secular, from every corner of the planet. In 1987 it was named the first European Cultural Route, and both the route and the city of Santiago are World Heritage sites.
The Cantabrian north, along with Catalonia, was one of the great cradles of Spanish industrialisation. The key was iron: the mines of Biscay produced ore of excellent quality, in high demand from European steelmakers, above all in Britain. Around the Bilbao estuary, from the mid-nineteenth century, a powerful steel, shipbuilding and mining industry developed that made the Basque Country one of the richest and most industrialised territories in Spain.
That economic transformation had enormous social consequences. A powerful industrial and financial bourgeoisie emerged — the big Basque banks were born in this period — and so did a large working class, largely made up of migrants from other regions of Spain, which profoundly changed traditional Basque society. Asturias, meanwhile, became the great coal basin, with its blackened valleys and a combative mining class at the centre of episodes such as the revolution of October 1934.
Behind all of this lies the question of the fueros. The Basque territories and Navarre had kept their charter regimes for centuries, with their own institutions and exemptions from taxation and military service. Their abolition or curtailment through the nineteenth century, after the Carlist defeats, was experienced as a grievance and lies at the origin both of Basque nationalism and of the system of 'economic agreements' that still gives these territories a distinctive fiscal autonomy within Spain.
One of the harshest chapters in the recent history of northern Spain, and of the country as a whole, was the terrorism of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, 'Basque Country and Freedom'). The organisation was born in 1959, in the middle of the Franco years, out of a youth split within Basque nationalism, with the aim of achieving by armed struggle the independence of a socialist Euskal Herria. Its first fatal attack came in 1968, and in 1973 it achieved huge impact with the assassination of the head of Franco's government, Admiral Carrero Blanco.
Far from disappearing with the arrival of democracy, ETA stepped up its activity in the 1970s and 1980s. Over half a century it murdered more than 850 people — politicians, Civil Guards, police officers, soldiers, judges, journalists, business owners and many anonymous citizens — as well as carrying out kidnappings and running extortion rackets. The state's response included police and judicial action but also very serious episodes of state terrorism, such as the GAL in the 1980s, which were themselves crimes tried in the courts.
Basque and Spanish society lived through decades of fear, grief and division, with a broad civic movement rejecting violence. After several failed ceasefires, ETA announced the definitive end of its armed activity in October 2011 and formally dissolved in 2018, without having achieved any of its political objectives. What remained was an open wound: the memory of the victims, the debate over reconciliation and coexistence, and the demand that that long horror be remembered truthfully and without justifications.
The Basque Country of recent decades has carried out one of the most celebrated urban transformations in Europe. Bilbao, the old industrial city on the estuary, in decline after the steel crisis, chose in the late twentieth century to reinvent itself. The symbol of that rebirth was the Guggenheim Museum, opened in 1997, a spectacular titanium building by the architect Frank Gehry that put the city on the world map and gave its name to an urban phenomenon, the 'Guggenheim effect': the regeneration of a city through culture and architecture.
A few kilometres away, San Sebastián (Donostia) represents another face of the north. An elegant coastal city set around the bay of La Concha — one of the most beautiful in the world — it became fashionable in the late nineteenth century as a summer retreat for the court and the aristocracy, in the middle of the Belle Époque, which gave it its patrician air. Today it is a cultural capital, with a prestigious international film festival, and above all a global reference point for food.
Because if anything sets the Atlantic north apart today, it is its cooking. The Basque Country holds an extraordinary density of high-end restaurants and Michelin stars, and it was the birthplace of the 'new Basque cuisine' that revolutionised Spanish gastronomy. Pintxos — those small bites served along the bar counters — the gastronomic societies, and a culture built on produce and the sea have turned cities such as San Sebastián and Bilbao into pilgrimage destinations for food lovers from all over the planet.