Flag of Spain
The Kingdom of Spain is a country located in the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe, bordering Portugal to the west, United Kingdom's Gibraltar to the south, Andorra to the north, and France to the north. Spain's capital is Madrid, and 46,704,314 people live in the country today. The main region is Catholicism, and the main languages are Spanish (Castilian), Catalan, and Basque.
Spain was first unified in 1479 when the crowns of Castile and Aragon were unified by the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon at the end of the Reconquista, and Christian rule was established over the Iberian Peninsula with the fall of Granada in 1492. Spain proceeded to become the center of a major overseas empire spanning the width of the globe, from the Americas to the Philippines. Spain was a bastion of the Catholic faith during Europe's wars of religion, but Spain's defeat in the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years' War led to the empire's might slowly declining. Spain lost most of its American possessions from the 1810s to 1820s, and the loss of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898 destroyed its status as a global power. Spain itself was devastated by the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s and fell under authoritarian rule as a result, achieving democracy in 1975 on Francisco Franco's death. As a multicultural country, Spain continued to experience regional tensions due to Basque and Catalan separatism, as well as increasing political polarization over rising Euroscepticism and xenophobia in much of the European Union during the 21st century. By 2023, Spain had a population of over 48 million people, of whom 53.8% were Christian, 41.3% irreligious, 3% other, and 1.9% unknown.
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