Spain

What territory Spain actually holds

Spain occupies most of the Iberian peninsula together with the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands in the Atlantic off North Africa, and two cities on the North African coast. It covers 505,990 square kilometres with 48,592,909 people as of January 2024.

The mainland is dominated by a central plateau, the meseta, at an average elevation around 600 metres and ringed by mountains, which is why so much of Spain sits high and why its interior has a continental climate rather than a Mediterranean one. The highest point of any Spanish territory is Teide on Tenerife at 3,715 metres, a volcano in the Canaries rather than a peak on the peninsula. Spain: geography works through the plateau and the two archipelagos.

Spain borders Portugal, France, Andorra, Morocco at the two North African cities, and Gibraltar, which has been under British sovereignty since 1713.

The distribution of people across that territory is uneven to a degree that shapes Spanish politics. Madrid and the Mediterranean arc hold most of the population and most of the output, while a band running through the interior has densities comparable to the emptiest parts of Scandinavia, produced by seventy years of migration towards the cities and the coast.

How the peninsula was assembled and reassembled

The territory has been Roman, Visigothic, Muslim across most of its extent, and then Christian again by a reconquest that took nearly eight centuries and produced several separate kingdoms rather than one.

Those kingdoms were joined dynastically at the end of the fifteenth century, in the same years that Granada fell, the Jews were expelled and the first voyage to the Americas was funded. The empire that followed made Spain the dominant European power of the sixteenth century and financed it with American silver, and its decline took three centuries and cost the American colonies by 1825 and the last of the rest in 1898.

The twentieth century is the part that still shapes the politics. A republic was declared in 1931, a civil war between 1936 and 1939 ended it, and a dictatorship held power until 1975. Spain: history follows the sequence from Rome to the transition.

How a decentralised state governs itself

Spain has governed itself under a constitution promulgated in 1978 as a parliamentary monarchy. The head of state has a long list of constitutional functions and no discretion in any of them, because the drafters deliberately used the phrase "it is incumbent upon the King" and avoided the words powers, faculties and competences.

Parliament is the Cortes Generales, in two chambers, with the government formed by whoever holds the confidence of the Congress of Deputies. Seats are allocated within provinces rather than nationally, which gives regionally concentrated parties a reliable route into parliament.

The territorial settlement is what makes Spain unusual. Seventeen autonomous communities and two autonomous cities run health, education, social services and in several cases policing, on a level of devolution ranked second in the world after Germany since 1998. The Basque Country and Navarre collect their own taxes and remit an agreed quota; the rest are financed by transfer. Spain: politics sets out the chambers and the argument that has run since 1978.

Where Spanish output actually comes from

Spain has grown faster than its European peers for several consecutive years on consumption, tourism, European recovery funds and a workforce expanded by migration. Output per person has grown more slowly than output, because the population is growing; the OECD attributes around 0.7 percentage points of annual growth per person between 2022 and 2024 to migration alone.

Unemployment at 10.4% in 2025 is simultaneously a historic low for Spain and the highest among its European neighbours, and the OECD's diagnosis of why incomes are not converging points at productivity and at the number of firms that never grow. Spain: economy covers the labour market and the water the agriculture depends on.

What Spain speaks and paints

Spanish is official throughout the state, and Catalan, Galician, Basque and Aranese are co-official in their own communities. Basque has no demonstrated relationship to any living language and survived the Romanisation that converted everything else on the peninsula.

Most speakers of Spanish live outside Spain, mostly in Latin America, and it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The literature produced what is generally taken to be the first modern novel, and the painting of the same period runs from El Greco through Velázquez to Goya.

Almost everything described abroad as Spanish culture is regional first. Flamenco is Andalusian, Modernisme is Catalan, and the festivals with the largest followings belong to particular cities. Spain: culture goes into the languages, the Golden Age and the argument underneath all of it.

What there is to see

Spain took around 97 million international visitors in 2025, its eighth record year running. Tourism was 12.6% of national output in 2024.

Roughly four fifths of arrivals go to the coasts and to Madrid and Barcelona, which leaves the meseta cities, the green Atlantic north and inland Andalusia comparatively quiet. The pressure where it does concentrate has produced protests: thousands demonstrated in the Canary Islands in April 2024 over housing and the local share of the revenue, with comparable demonstrations elsewhere since. Spain: travel deals with the coasts, the islands, the interior and the seasons.

Where Spain stands

Spain joined NATO in 1982 and the European Community in 1986 alongside Portugal, adopted the euro at its introduction, and is in the Schengen area, the OECD and the World Trade Organization.

Two territorial questions remain open with neighbours: Spain claims Gibraltar, and Morocco claims the two autonomous cities on the North African coast. Those cities are the European Union's only land borders with Africa, which has made migration policy a permanent rather than an episodic subject.

The relationship with Latin America gives Spain a standing across a continent that its economic weight alone would not, exercised through the Ibero-American summits and through Spanish corporate positions in banking and energy across the region.