Spain, officially the Kingdom of Spain is a country in Southwestern Europe with some pockets of territory across the Strait of Gibraltar and the Atlantic Ocean. Its continental European territory is situated on the Iberian Peninsula. Its territory also includes two archipelagos: the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa, and the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. The African exclaves of Ceuta, Melilla, and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera make Spain the only European country to have a physical border with an African country (Morocco). Several small islands in the Alboran Sea are also part of Spanish territory. The country's mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea; to the north and northeast by France, Andorra, and the Bay of Biscay; and to the west and northwest by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean respectively.
Modern
humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 35,000 years ago.
Various cultures developed alongside Phoenician, Greek, Celtic and
Carthaginian migration and settlement. The Romans conquered the region
around 200 BC, naming it Hispania, after the earlier Phoenician name,
Sp(a)n or Spania. Spain remained under Roman rule until the collapse of
the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century, which ushered in
Germanic tribal confederations from Central Europe. The Visigoths
emerged as the dominant faction by the fifth century, with their kingdom
spanning much of the peninsula.
In
the early eighth century, the Visigothic Kingdom was conquered by the
Umayyad Caliphate, ushering in over 700 years of Muslim rule. Islamic
Spain became a major economic and intellectual center, with the city of
Cordoba being among the largest and richest in Europe. Several Christian
kingdoms emerged in the northern periphery of Iberia, chief among them
León, Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Navarre. Over the next seven
centuries, an intermittent southward expansion of these kingdoms -
metahistorically framed as a reconquest, or Reconquista - culminated
with the Christian seizure of the last Muslim polity, the Nasrid Kingdom
of Granada, in 1492. That same year, Christopher Columbus arrived in
the New World on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs, whose dynastic union
of Castile and Aragon is sometimes considered the emergence Spain as a
unified country. From the 16th until the early 19th century, Spain ruled
one of the largest empires in history, which was among the first global
empires; its immense cultural and linguistic legacy includes over 570
million Hispanophones, making Spanish the world's second-most spoken
native language, after Mandarin Chinese. Spain hosts the world's
third-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Spain
is a secular parliamentary democracy and a parliamentary monarchy, with
King Felipe VI as head of state. It is a highly developed country and a
high income country, with the world's fourteenth-largest economy by
nominal GDP and the sixteenth-largest by PPP. Spain is a member of the
United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), the Eurozone, the Council
of Europe (CoE), the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), the
Union for the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the
Schengen Area, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and many other
international organisations. While not an official member, Spain has a
"Permanent Invitation" to the G20 summits, participating in every
summit, which makes it a de facto member of the group.
