Iberia

Before Rome the peninsula was a patchwork: Iberians along the Mediterranean, Celts and Celtiberians on the plateau and in the north-west, Phoenician and Greek trading posts on the coast, Carthaginians in the south. Cádiz, founded by Phoenicians around 1100 BCE, claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in western Europe.

Rome took two centuries to conquer it after the Second Punic War, and then made it one of the empire's richest provinces. Hispania gave Rome olive oil, silver, emperors (Trajan and Hadrian were born near Seville) and the Latin that became Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Galician. Aqueducts at Segovia, theatres at Mérida and bridges still in use are the most visible legacy.

Visigoths ruled from Toledo after Rome fell, converting from Arian to Catholic Christianity in 589. Their kingdom collapsed in a few years after 711, when an army from North Africa crossed the strait at Gibraltar — the rock is named after its commander, Tariq ibn Ziyad (Jabal Tariq, 'Tariq's mountain').

For almost eight centuries much of the peninsula was al-Andalus, a Muslim society with large Christian and Jewish communities. Córdoba under the 10th-century caliphate was one of the largest and most learned cities in Europe; its Great Mosque, with a cathedral later built inside it, is the clearest record of that age.

Small Christian kingdoms in the northern mountains — Asturias, León, Castile, Navarre, Aragon, and the county that became Portugal — pushed south over centuries in what later historians called the Reconquista. Portugal took its present shape early, reaching the Algarve by 1249. Castile took Toledo in 1085, Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, leaving only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, whose Alhambra palace was built in this last phase.

Granada fell to Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in January 1492. The same year Jews were ordered to convert or leave, and within a century Muslims and their converted descendants (Moriscos) were expelled too. The mudéjar style — Islamic craft in Christian buildings — survives in Seville's Alcázar, Teruel's towers and ceilings across Castile and Portugal.

Portugal, with a long Atlantic coast and no room to grow in Europe, turned outward first. Its navigators rounded Africa (Dias, 1488), reached India (Vasco da Gama, 1498) and Brazil (Cabral, 1500). Spain funded Columbus in 1492 and within fifty years held most of the Americas. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas split the non-European world between the two crowns along a meridian — which is why Brazil speaks Portuguese.

Silver from Mexico and Peru made Seville, and later Cádiz, the richest ports in Europe and paid for Spain's wars across the continent. Lisbon grew on spice, sugar and the Atlantic slave trade. The Manueline style — stone ropes, anchors and sea creatures on Belém's Jerónimos Monastery — is Portugal's architecture of this moment.

From 1580 to 1640 the two crowns were joined under the Spanish Habsburgs; Portugal regained independence in a revolt, and its alliance with England, dating from 1386, became its shield. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami destroyed much of the capital; the rebuilt grid of the Baixa is one of Europe's first planned modern districts.

Both countries spent much of the 20th century under authoritarian rule. Portugal's Estado Novo, led by António de Oliveira Salazar from 1932, kept the country poor, Catholic and neutral, and fought colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau into the 1970s. In Spain, the Second Republic of 1931 ended in the Civil War of 1936–39 and Francisco Franco's dictatorship, which lasted until his death in 1975.

On 25 April 1974 junior officers in Lisbon overthrew the regime almost without bloodshed; people put carnations in the soldiers' rifles, and the Carnation Revolution gave Portugal democracy and ended its African empire. In Spain, King Juan Carlos and reformers negotiated a transition: a new constitution in 1978 and a failed military coup in 1981 that confirmed democracy's support.

Spain and Portugal joined the European Community together on 1 January 1986. EU funds paid for motorways, airports, the high-speed rail network and the euro-era boom; the 2008 crash then hit both hard, with youth unemployment above 50% in Spain. Tourism — now well over 90 million foreign visitors a year to Spain — is both a pillar of recovery and a source of protests over housing in Barcelona, Málaga, the Canaries and Lisbon.

Spain is a state of several nations in the eyes of many who live there. Catalan is spoken by about ten million people in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearics; Basque (Euskara), unrelated to any other living language, in the Basque Country and Navarre; Galician, close to Portuguese, in the north-west. All are co-official in their regions, and signs, schools and train announcements use them. Catalonia's 2017 independence referendum and its aftermath still shape Spanish politics.

Portugal is the reverse: one of Europe's oldest stable borders and a single language, with Mirandese as a small co-official exception in the north-east. Portuguese speakers worldwide outnumber the country's own population more than twenty times over, mostly in Brazil.

Andorra survived because it was useful to its neighbours: since 1278 it has been shared between the Bishop of Urgell and a French lord whose title passed to the French head of state. It has Catalan as its only official language and became a modern parliamentary state in 1993, with the two co-princes kept as joint heads of state. Gibraltar was ceded by Spain to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht; Spain still claims it, the frontier was closed from 1969 to 1985, and the 2026 UK–EU treaty finally removed routine checks at the land border while leaving sovereignty untouched.