Spain

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Most countries on this atlas can point to a single proclamation, treaty or parliament session as the day the state began. Spain cannot, and the honest answer to when Spain was founded is that no one date is really correct. Castile and Aragon, the two largest Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia, were joined not by conquest but by marriage, when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile wed in 1469 and began ruling their two kingdoms jointly while each kingdom kept its own laws, courts and institutions for centuries afterward. The Reconquista, the centuries-long Christian reclamation of the peninsula from Muslim al-Andalus, reached its final act under their joint rule with the fall of Granada in January 1492, the same year Columbus sailed with their backing. 1492 is the conventional marker this atlas uses for Spain, but it marks the completion of a war, not the creation of a government, and true administrative unification of Castile and Aragon under one crown, one law and one capital took centuries longer still to finish.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Philip II moved the Spanish royal court to Madrid in 1561, he was not choosing the country's grandest city. Toledo, Seville and Valladolid all had older claims, established church hierarchies, wealthy merchant classes and, crucially, entrenched local nobility who expected the crown to answer to their interests. Madrid, by contrast, was a modest town with no cathedral of note and no powerful resident aristocracy, sitting near the geographic center of the Iberian Peninsula on the high, dry Meseta Central plateau. That obscurity was the point. A capital with no existing power base of its own could be built up entirely as an instrument of royal authority, beholden to the crown rather than to a bishop or a ducal family who had been running the city for generations before the king arrived. Madrid remained the capital from that choice onward, with one interruption when the royal court relocated to Valladolid from 1601 to 1606 under Philip III before returning to Madrid for good, and the city's later growth into a metropolis of the size Spain now has was a consequence of the decision rather than a reason for it.