Spain's culture: what it speaks, paints and argues about

How many languages Spain actually has

Article 3 of the constitution makes Spanish the official language of the state and allows other languages to be official within autonomous communities according to their own statutes. What follows from that is one of the more complicated sociolinguistic situations in Europe.

Beneath the co-official five sit further Romance varieties with recognition but not official status: Astur-Leonese, Aragonese, Extremaduran and Fala, along with Caló, a mixed Romani and Romance speech used by Spanish Roma.

Basque is the one that stands outside every category. It has no demonstrated relationship to any other living language, it was spoken in the western Pyrenees before Latin arrived, and it survived the Romanisation that converted every other language on the peninsula. Around 85% of modern Spanish vocabulary derives from Latin, as does that of the other Spanish languages; Basque is the exception to that sentence as well.

Spanish itself carries a substantial medieval Arabic vocabulary from eight centuries of Muslim rule in parts of the peninsula, alongside Greek by way of Latin and smaller contributions from Basque and Celtic.

Why Spanish became a global language

Most speakers of Spanish now live outside Spain, the majority of them in Latin America, and it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The language of a country of 48.6 million people is spoken as a first language by hundreds of millions.

That distribution follows the empire and it has consequences for how the language is governed. Norms are set through a association of academies spanning the Spanish-speaking states rather than by Madrid alone, and the linguistic centre of gravity has been outside Europe for a very long time.

Spanish cultural production is read in the same way. Spain's literature is treated as the historical basis of Latin American literature and an influence on Filipino culture, and the traffic since the twentieth century has run substantially in the other direction, with the Latin American novel reshaping what Spanish-language fiction is.

What the Golden Age produced

The century and a half from roughly the middle of the sixteenth century produced the works that fix Spanish literature and painting for everything afterwards.

Its central book was published in two volumes a decade apart and is generally treated as the founding work of the modern novel in any language, regularly placed at or near the top of lists of the greatest fiction ever written. It is a comedy about a man who has read too many chivalric romances, and the joke it makes about the gap between what is read and what is seen has kept it usable for four hundred years.

The painting of the same period ran from El Greco through Velázquez and Murillo, and continued into Goya at the turn of the nineteenth century, whose late work is closer to the twentieth than to his own. The twentieth century then produced the most widely known artist Spain has had, alongside Dalí, Gris, Miró and Tàpies, most of whom worked substantially outside the country during the dictatorship.

What Spanish architecture is layered from

Spanish building history is a sequence of layers rather than a single tradition, because the peninsula changed hands repeatedly and each ruler built.

Mudéjar work applies Islamic craft technique to Christian buildings, produced by Muslim artisans working after the reconquest, and the palace complex in Seville is its principal example. Romanesque arrived along the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela and the cathedral at its end is the monument of it. Gothic produced the cathedrals of Burgos, León and Toledo, Renaissance the palace of Charles V inside the Alhambra, and Baroque the cathedral at Granada.

The nineteenth century turned back on itself with eclecticism, regionalism, a Neo-Mudéjar revival and glass construction. The twentieth opened with Catalan Modernisme and the unfinished basilica in Barcelona that is still being built, and closed with a contemporary architecture that has made several Spanish cities destinations for the buildings alone.

Spain's World Heritage list is dominated by that architectural sequence rather than by natural sites.

Why flamenco is Andalusian rather than Spanish

Flamenco is treated abroad as the Spanish national art form and it is an Andalusian one, developed among Roma, Andalusian and Moorish traditions in the south and carried outward from there.

The distinction matters because it is the pattern for most of what is described as Spanish culture. Bullfighting is legally restricted or abolished in several communities and central to the calendar in others. The regional festivals with the largest followings, the running of bulls in Pamplona, the burning sculptures of Valencia, the tomato fight near Valencia and the Holy Week processions of Seville, belong to particular places and were never national in origin.

What travelled abroad as Spanish culture was substantially the culture of the south, promoted as such during the dictatorship, when a single national identity was official policy and regional languages and traditions were suppressed. The reaction against that after 1975 is part of why regional cultural assertion has been so strong since.

How the regions assert themselves culturally

Regional identity in Spain is a cultural project with public money behind it, and the scale of that is easy to miss from outside.

Autonomous communities run their own broadcasters, in their own languages where they have one, alongside the Spanish national networks. Education is a devolved competence, so the language of instruction, the history curriculum and the literary canon taught in school are decided regionally. Cultural institutions, festivals and heritage funding follow the same route.

The effect over four decades has been substantial. Catalan, which had been excluded from public life during the dictatorship, is now the working language of a regional administration, a university system and a media sector. Basque, which had far fewer speakers and no mutual intelligibility with Spanish to help learners, has been revived through immersion schooling from a position that looked terminal in the 1960s. Galician, closest of the three to Spanish and therefore most exposed to it, has held its position less securely.

Whether the outcome is a healthy plurality or a set of parallel societies is the argument that runs underneath Spanish cultural politics, and it is conducted in terms of school hours and broadcasting quotas rather than in the abstract.

What is eaten and where

Spanish cooking is regional to a degree that makes a national cuisine hard to describe, and the regions divide chiefly by what the land and the sea provide.

The north-west lives on Atlantic seafood and on the octopus and shellfish of Galicia. The Basque Country has the highest concentration of celebrated restaurants in the country and a bar culture built on small dishes eaten standing. The centre is roasting country, on lamb and suckling pig, and the source of a stew that simmers all day. The Mediterranean coast produces the rice dishes, of which the one from Valencia is internationally known and locally disputed. Andalusia runs on olive oil, cured ham, fried fish and cold soups made for a climate that reaches forty degrees.

Two constants cross all of it. Cured ham from acorn-fed pigs is a national product with regional appellations, and olive oil is produced here in very large quantity.

Wine is on the same scale and less recognised for it. Spain has a very large area under vine, and its principal regions produce in styles that have little to do with one another: the aged reds of Rioja and Ribera del Duero, the fortified wines of the Andalusian south, the sparkling wine of Catalonia, and the Atlantic whites of Galicia grown on granite in a wet climate. Much of that production was sold in bulk for most of the twentieth century and has been rebuilt around bottling and appellation within two generations.

The eating pattern itself is a cultural marker: lunch in mid-afternoon, dinner after nine, and a small-plate habit that is a way of moving between bars rather than a menu format.

What eight centuries of Muslim rule left

Parts of the peninsula were under Muslim rule for periods reaching close to eight hundred years, and the inheritance is not confined to buildings.

The vocabulary is the most pervasive trace. A large body of Spanish words for irrigation, administration, mathematics, agriculture and architecture came from Arabic, and the definite article carried in with them is why so many of those words begin with the same two letters. Place names across the south record the same period.

The material inheritance runs from the palace and fortress complex above Granada, completed in the fourteenth century, through the great mosque at Córdoba with a cathedral built inside it, to the irrigation systems of the south-east that are still in use and to a water court in Valencia that has met weekly for a thousand years to settle disputes between farmers.

How that period should be described is itself contested. One account presents a long convivencia in which three religions coexisted productively under Muslim and then Christian rule; another emphasises that the coexistence was hierarchical, periodically violent and ended in expulsions. Both are supported by evidence from different centuries and regions, and Spanish historiography has argued about the balance since the nineteenth century, when the question first became a proxy for what kind of country Spain was.

How the country holds its religion now

Spain is a secular state with a Catholic history that structures the calendar, the architecture and a substantial part of the cultural inheritance, and a practising population that has fallen a long way.

The dictatorship made Catholicism an instrument of national identity, and the constitution of 1978 declared no state religion while requiring public authorities to maintain relations with the Catholic Church and others. That formula reflects the position exactly: an institution with a formal relationship to the state and a diminishing hold on the population.

Practice has fallen fastest among the young and in the cities, and Spain legislated for divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion access earlier and with less institutional resistance than most Catholic countries in Europe.

What has not diminished is the calendar. Holy Week processions in Seville and across Andalusia draw enormous participation, local patron saint festivals organise the year in most towns, and the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela carries more walkers now than it has at any time since the Middle Ages, most of them not walking it for religious reasons.

The brotherhoods that organise the Holy Week processions are the clearest case of what has happened. They are lay associations, some of them five centuries old, with membership lists, workshops, warehouses and year-round obligations, and they have kept their numbers in cities where mass attendance has collapsed. Belonging to one is a civic and family inheritance as much as a religious commitment, which is why the processions have survived the decline of the practice they were founded to express.