The empire where the sun never set spanned 13.7 million km²
From Columbus in 1492 to late remnants into 1976, the Spanish Empire—also called the Hispanic or Catholic Monarchy—helped open Europe’s Age of Discovery. At its late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century peak it covered about 13.7 million square kilometres across Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Europe.
Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile’s marriage forged a personal union that scholars treat as the Spanish monarchy’s foundation. They finished Granada in 1492, won the Catholic Monarchs title, and backed Columbus west after Alcáçovas (1479) had locked Castile out of the African route Portugal dominated. Tordesillas (7 June 1494), confirming Inter caetera, split the globe with Portugal; Magellan–Elcano’s circumnavigation grounded a Pacific and East Indies claim. Silver from Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Potosí funded wars; Genoese bankers underwrote expeditions.
Portugal alone seriously challenged early New World hegemony until Spain forced the Iberian Union (1580–1640). Philip V’s Bourbon accession in 1700 after childless Charles II brought Nueva Planta centralization, freer colonial trade, and deepening peninsular–Creole splits that fed early-nineteenth-century independence. By the mid-1820s Mexico, Central America, and South America were gone; 1898’s Spanish–American War cost Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Dutch, English, and French nibbled Caribbean footholds mainly for contraband.
Professional letrado bureaucracy spawned specialized boards—one governing overseas realms from Spain, another (the House of Trade) policing Atlantic commerce. Canary conquest, begun 1402 under Henry III and finished 1478–1496 on Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Tenerife, saw over ninety percent of native Canarians killed or enslaved by 1504. Capitulations of Santa Fe (17 April 1492) named Columbus viceroy of lands found. The slogan “empire on which the sun never sets,” earlier attached to Charles V’s realms, became literal under Philip II with permanent Philippine colonization.
Across three-plus centuries the monarchy glued together Castilian Atlantic projection, Aragonese Mediterranean habits, and American silver into a global composite state—then watched Bourbon reform and Napoleonic crisis shatter the American core.
Source: Spanish Empire
