Spain
Spain occupies most of the Iberian Peninsula, cut off from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees and turned for centuries toward Africa and the Atlantic — a position that gave it both an empire and the first modern novel.
- Capital
- Madrid
- Region
- Southern Europe
- Area
- 505,992 km²
Geography
Spain covers roughly 506,000 square kilometres, second only to France in western Europe. Most of it is the Meseta Central, a high inland plateau ringed by mountains and averaging some 600 metres above sea level, which makes Madrid the highest capital city in Europe.
The Pyrenees seal the French border along a 430-kilometre wall breached by few passes. The highest point in the country is not on the mainland at all but on Tenerife, where the volcano Teide rises to 3,715 metres; the mainland summit is Mulhacén in the Sierra Nevada, at 3,479 metres. Beyond the peninsula, Spain holds the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean and the Canaries off north-west Africa.
History
Roman Hispania gave the peninsula its roads, its law and the Latin from which Castilian grew. After the Visigoths came the Muslim conquest of 711, and for nearly eight centuries Al-Andalus made Córdoba and Granada among the most learned cities in Europe.
The year 1492 concentrated an extraordinary amount of history: Granada fell, completing the Reconquista; the Jews were expelled; and Columbus sailed. The empire that followed made Spain the dominant European power of the sixteenth century and left Spanish the first language of some twenty countries.
The modern state was forged more painfully — the loss of the last colonies in 1898, the Civil War of 1936 to 1939, and the Franco dictatorship that followed it. Democracy returned after Franco's death in 1975, formalised in the constitution of 1978.
Literary heritage
Spanish literature can claim the novel itself. Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605 and the second in 1615, and the book's method — a protagonist who has read too much, moving through a world that refuses to match his reading — has been imitated ever since.
The Siglo de Oro that surrounded him was crowded: Lope de Vega wrote plays by the hundred, Calderón gave the Spanish stage its philosophical turn, and Góngora and Quevedo conducted a feud in verse that readers still take sides in.
The twentieth century's defining figure is Federico García Lorca, whose Blood Wedding and Poet in New York fused folk forms with the avant-garde, and whose murder by Nationalist forces in 1936, weeks into the Civil War, made him the period's emblem as well as its poet.