Climate: temperate; clear, hot summers in interior, more moderate and cloudy along coast; cloudy, cold winters in interior, partly cloudy and cool along coast
Terrain: large, flat to dissected plateau surrounded by rugged hills; Pyrenees in north
Principal languages: Castilian Spanish; second languages include Catalan 17%, Galician 7%, Basque 2%
Principal religions: Roman Catholic 99%, other sects 1%
Rank of affluence among U.N. members: 24/183
The only nation in western Europe ever dominated by Islam, Spain until recently was odd man out on the continent. Its unique path began in the 8th century, when this former possession of the Roman and Visigoth empires was conquered by Muslim Morocco.
Under the Umayyad dynasty, al-Andalus, as Spain was called, became the richest, most sophisticated part of Europe. Islamic scholars preserved the knowledge of the Greeks even as the rest of the continent languished in the Dark Ages.
Three Christian kingdoms (Navarre, Aragon, and Castile) ruled most of the peninsula from the 11th to the 15th century, when a reunited Spain under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella went on a binge of conquest, consolidating a huge empire in the New World which it ruled with brutal abandon. A long series of colonial revolts in the 18th and 19th centuries put the nation into an extended period of decline. By the dawn of the 20th century, having lost the brief Spanish-American war of 1898 (and with it, Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines), Spain found itself poor and unstable.
A bloody civil war from 1936-39 provided the opportunity for fascist General Francisco Franco to seize power. A long period of isolation ensued, which finally ended with Franco's death in 1975. In a burst of democratic optimism, Spain leaped to economic prosperity and rejoined the European community, achieving full Common Market status in 1986. But in recent years Spain has acquired a full array of modern European problems: recession, inflation, unemployment, ethnic discontent and a loss of biodiversity, this last perhaps most alarming in the long run.
