A high plateau with Africa in sight
Spain sits higher than its beaches suggest. Most of the mainland is the Meseta Central, a plateau lying between about 610 and 760 metres, and the country's average altitude is 650 metres. Mountains frame it, with the Pyrenees running 435 kilometres from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay. Spain's highest ground is offshore, in the Canary Islands, where the volcano Teide rises more than 3,700 metres on Tenerife.
Africa is close. Barely 14 kilometres of water separate the continents at the narrowest point of the Strait of Gibraltar, and two arguments remain unsettled there. The Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla stand on the African mainland in territory Morocco claims. On the northern shore, Britain holds Gibraltar under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which Spain reads narrowly, rejecting British control of the isthmus. A UK and EU treaty signed in July 2026 provides for a fluid land frontier, and Gibraltar's government says British sovereignty remains protected.
Granada, 1492 and the empire that followed
Muslim forces landed at Gibraltar in 711 and overran most of the Visigothic kingdom. Under the caliphate declared in 929, Córdoba grew into one of the great cultural and commercial cities of the Mediterranean. That state had broken apart by 1031, the Christian kingdoms of the north pushed south, and from the mid-thirteenth century only Granada remained, the emirate whose Nasrid rulers built the Alhambra. It surrendered on 2 January 1492.
The victors then turned on religious minorities. That March the Catholic Monarchs ordered Jews to convert or leave. Modern estimates of those expelled run from 40,000 to 200,000 and remain debated, and many others accepted baptism instead. The Moriscos, descendants of Muslims forced to convert, were ordered out in 1609. Their expulsion took about five years, and an estimated 300,000 resettled, mainly in North Africa.
Columbus also sailed in 1492, opening an empire. The Aztec Empire fell by 1521, the last Inca stronghold in 1572, and silver from Potosí came to drive the colonial economy. The human cost was immense. The Indigenous population of the Americas fell by an estimated 80 percent within a century and a half of Columbus, mainly through disease but alongside forced labour and resettlement. Enslaved Africans were shipped in to replace them. Spain outlawed the trade in 1817, yet imports to Cuba continued until 1867, and slavery there ended only in October 1886. Spanish rule on the American mainland was over by 1824, and war with the United States cost Spain Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam in 1898.
From civil war to a contested constitution
A partly failed coup in July 1936 became a civil war that lasted until 1 April 1939, with Italy and Germany backing Franco's Nationalists and the Soviet Union supporting the Republic. Estimates of civilians killed run from 50,000 to 200,000 in the Nationalist zone and from 38,000 upwards in the Republican zone. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans fled, mostly to camps in southern France, and many who stayed were persecuted.
Franco ruled until his death on 20 November 1975. Change then came quickly: a free national election in 1977, the first since 1936, a constitution approved by referendum on 6 December 1978, and European membership in 1986. The reckoning with the past came far later. Only a law of 2022 obliged the state to search for the missing, of whom around 114,000 were reported still unaccounted for.
The constitution rests on "the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation" and also recognises the right to autonomy of its "nationalities and regions". Of the seventeen autonomous communities, six give official standing to another language alongside Spanish, tongues that Franco's regime had shut out of schools and public services. One is Basque, which has no known relative. In the Basque Country the dispute turned violent: ETA killed more than 800 people between 1968 and 2010 and dissolved itself in 2018.
In Catalonia it became a constitutional crisis. A referendum went ahead on 1 October 2017 despite suspension by the Constitutional Court, and police raided some polling stations. The Catalan government reported about nine in ten votes in favour on a turnout near 43 percent, with opposing parties urging people not to take part. The Catalan parliament declared independence that month with opposition members absent. No sovereign state recognised it, and Madrid dismissed the regional government and called elections. An amnesty law for those involved passed in 2024 and was upheld by six votes to four in 2025.
A country remade by arrivals
Spain is growing today because of people born elsewhere. Its population reached 49.8 million in July 2026, about one resident in five was born abroad, and fertility, at 1.10 children per woman in 2024, was the EU's second lowest. Visitors come in greater numbers still: a record 96.8 million in 2025, nearly twice the population, and residents of Barcelona and Mallorca have marched against the pressure on housing.
Spanish, meanwhile, has long outgrown Spain, with about 520 million native speakers worldwide. Some of that legacy now flows back. Colombians and Venezuelans headed the list of immigrants arriving in late 2025, carrying the language of the old empire home.
