Europe’s southern tip once spun the first global trade web
Spain, the Kingdom of Spain, is Southern Europe’s largest country and the EU’s fourth-most populous, spanning most of Iberia plus the Canaries, Balearics, and North African plazas. It holds continental Europe’s southernmost point. Roman Hispania, Islamic centuries, and an Age of Discovery empire that completed the first circumnavigation still shape its map.
Hominids lived at Atapuerca some 1.3 million years ago, and Neanderthals held out in Iberia until roughly 40,000 years ago, among the last places in Europe they survived. Cro-Magnon artists painted the Altamira cave in Cantabria between about 35,600 and 13,500 BC. Phoenicians planted dense colonies along the south, with Gadir tied closely to Tyre, and Greeks founded Emporion in 570 BC. The Phoenician name may have meant land of rabbits, and coins from Hadrian's reign show a woman with a rabbit at her feet.
Rome took nearly two centuries to conquer the peninsula and then kept it for over six hundred years. Hispania shipped gold, wool, olive oil and wine, fed Roman markets, and produced the emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius I along with Seneca. After 409 Suebi, Vandals and Alans poured in, and the Visigoths eventually ruled from Toledo until Umayyad armies overran almost everything between 711 and 718.
Al-Andalus, centred on Córdoba, gradually gained a Muslim majority, then splintered into taifa kingdoms paying tribute to the Christian north. Toledo fell to the Christians in 1085, Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. León held what is described as an early parliament in 1188. The 1469 marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand joined Castile and Aragon; in 1492 Granada surrendered, up to 200,000 Jews were expelled, and Columbus reached the Caribbean on a voyage Isabella paid for.
The empire that followed completed the first circumnavigation and drove a global trade in precious metals. Later came the Peninsular War against Napoleon from 1808 to 1814, the Civil War of 1936 to 1939 and Franco's rule until 1975. Today Spain is a constitutional monarchy under Felipe VI with the EU's fourth-largest economy, and Spanish ranks second worldwide by native speakers.
Source: Spain
