Spanish History

In Europe, Spanish civilization is probably the most complex. Evidence has been found by the archeological site of Atapuerca that there were pre-human communities from about 800,000 BCE living in Spain. This was more than half-a-million years ago even before Homo sapiens emerged into Spain.

For at least a thousand years before Christ, various civilizations explored, settled and fought to dominate the Iberian Peninsula, which were the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans. Rome conquered Gaul over a period of two centuries in order to subdue the Iberians. During that time, Numantians known now as Old Castile held out against the Romans for over twenty years. They finally committed collective suicide rather than submit to invaders.

The Roman Empire and Germanic tribes invaded the country by crossing the Peninsula then eventually migrating as far south as Africa. The Latin language was then adopted and Toledo was named the capital of the Roman city. Around 711 the Moors invaded from northern Africa and swiftly conquered most of the Peninsula, which is a key date in Iberian history.

This great division was the parting of waters that separated Spanish culture from the mainstream of European history. Spain and England would be archrivals for three centuries, struggling for control of the sea lanes between Europe and America, bad blood then flowed between the two countries. The English saw Spain as the home of fanaticism, poverty, the inquisition, backwardness, the Counter Reformation and barbarous customs like the bullfight. The Spanish saw England as perfidious Albion, which is the home of the pirates, skeptics and heretics and beginning in 1704, the illegal occupiers of Gibraltar, a piece of their national soil.

Spain was a watershed as the American War between the states. In the United States the conflict led to a unified country and a freer polity; Spain then led to forty years of fascism and dictatorship. The great wonder of modern Spanish history is that the nation has been able to move so surely from tyranny to democracy in the last quarter-century. This would be a transition that is the envy of most countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Freethinkers were persecuted in the seventeenth century then there were the followers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and then there were the liberals in the nineteenth. Afterwards there were politics, like the democrats, socialists, communists and separatists in the twentieth century.

Roman historian was noted long before Spain existed as a political body, if the people have no foreign enemy, they look for one at home. In 1975 the General Francisco Franco passed away and Spain finally restored its buried tradition.

Spain also possesses one of the world’s most impressive memorials of primitive humans, the stunning cave paintings at Altamira in the Cantabrian region.

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