Spain (Spanish: España), is a country mostly located on the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. It is the second largest country in the EU.

Modern humans arrived in the Peninsula around 35,000 years ago. It came under Roman rule around 200 BCE. At the end of the Roman Empire the Germanic tribes invaded and established independent realms. Eventually, the Visigoths forcibly integrated all realms into the Kingdom of Toledo.

In the early eighth century the Visigoth Kingdom fell to the Moors in 726, leaving only a handful of small Christian realms in the north. Following the Moorish conquest, Europeans began a gradual process of retaking the region known as the Reconquista, which by the late 15th century culminated in the emergence of Spain as a unified country.

In the early modern period, Spain became the world’s first global empire and the most powerful country in the world, leaving a large cultural and linguistic legacy that includes 570 million Hispanophones, making Spanish the world’s second-most spoken native language.