Dictionary:

Spain

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Spain

(Mapping Specialists, Ltd.)

A country of southwest Europe comprising most of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic and Canary Islands. Inhabited since the Stone Age, the region was colonized by Phoenicians and Greeks and later ruled by Carthage and Rome (after 201 B.C.). Barbarians first invaded Spain in A.D. 409 but were supplanted by Moors from North Africa (711–719), who organized a kingdom known for its learning and splendor. The Moors were gradually displaced by small Christian states and were ousted from their last stronghold, Granada, in 1492. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile then became rulers of a united Spain, which became a world power through exploration and conquest. After the empire was lost in the 18th and 19th centuries, Spain experienced social and economic unrest that culminated in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the rise of Francisco Franco. After Franco's death in 1975 the monarchy was restored under King Juan Carlos, who oversaw the creation of a parliamentary democracy. Madrid is the capital and the largest city. Population: 40,400,000.

Country, southwestern Europe. One of Europe's largest countries, it is located on the Iberian Peninsula and also includes the Balearic and Canary islands. Area: 195,379 sq mi (506,030 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 44,079,000. Capital: Madrid. The people are predominantly Spanish, though there are populations of Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Aragonese, and Roma (Gypsies or Gitanos). Languages: Castilian Spanish (official), Catalan, Galician, Basque. Religion: Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholic). Currency: euro. Spain's large central plateau is surrounded by the Ebro River valley, the mountainous Catalonia region, the Mediterranean coastal region of Valencia, the Guadalquivir River valley, and the mountainous region extending from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic coast. Spain has a developed market economy based on services, light and heavy industries, and agriculture. Mineral resources include iron ore, mercury, and coal. Agricultural products include grains and livestock. Spain is one of the world's major producers of wine and olive oil. Tourism is also a major industry, especially along the southern Costa del Sol. Spain is a constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses; the chief of state is the king, and the head of government is the prime minister.

Remains of Stone Age populations dating back some 35,000 years have been found throughout Spain. Celtic peoples arrived in the 9th century BC, followed by the Romans, who dominated Spain from c. 200 BC until the Visigoth invasion in the early 5th century AD. In the early 8th century most of the peninsula fell to Muslims (Moors) from North Africa, and it remained under their control until it was gradually reconquered by the Christian kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. Spain was reunited in 1479 following the marriage of Ferdinand II (of Aragon) and Isabella I (of Castile). The last Muslim kingdom, Granada, was reconquered in 1492, and about this time Spain established a colonial empire in the Americas. In 1516 the throne passed to the Habsburgs, whose rule ended in 1700 when Philip V became the first Bourbon king of Spain. His ascendancy caused the War of the Spanish Succession, which resulted in the loss of numerous European possessions and sparked revolution within most of Spain's American colonies. Spain lost its remaining overseas possessions to the U.S. in the Spanish-American War (1898). (See Cuba; Guam; Philippines; Puerto Rico.) Spain became a republic in 1931. The Spanish Civil War (1936 – 39) ended in victory for the Nationalists under Gen. Francisco Franco, who ruled as a dictator until his death in 1975. His successor as head of state, Juan Carlos I, restored the monarchy with his accession to the throne; a new constitution in 1978 established a constitutional monarchy. Spain joined NATO in 1982 and the European Community in 1986. The 1992 quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's first voyage from Spain to the Americas was marked by a fair in Sevilla and the staging of the Olympic Games in Barcelona. In the late 20th century and into the 21st, some Basque separatists continued to resort to violence as they pressed for independence, but it was Islamic militants who were responsible for the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid that killed more than 200 people — the worst terrorist incident in Europe since World War II.

For more information on Spain, visit Britannica.com.

As in most European countries c.1839, progressive circles in Spain looked to Paris as the source of innovation and enlightenment. The announcement of Daguerre's invention was therefore extensively covered, with a predictably optimistic gloss, in the liberal press. In early 1839, however, the prestigious Academy of Arts and Sciences of Barcelona was also getting direct information about Daguerre's process from its agent in Paris, the doctor and writer Pedro Felipe Monlau y Roca (1808-71), whose reports led it to acquire a daguerreotype outfit, brought to Barcelona by the engraver Ramón Alabern. The academy then organized a public demonstration of the process. On the morning of 10 November 1839, to the accompaniment of a band, and explanations for the spectators of what was going on, Alabern made a successful exposure of a building. The resulting daguerreotype was exhibited, and publicly raffled four days later. Thus did photography become a practical reality in Spain.

In 1839-40 up to four different translations of Daguerre's manual were published—an unprecedented event for a technical work in Spain. However, photographic activity remained limited, given the narrow basis of science and technology in Spanish society, and because the country was just emerging from civil war (1833-9). But by 1850, cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, and Cadiz had portrait studios, and shops where daguerreotype equipment could be obtained. The advent of the wet-plate process and the spread of the carte de visite subsequently boosted the portrait business, so that by c.1860 practically every provincial capital had a least a couple of permanent studios. By 1900, their numbers had increased dramatically. As elsewhere, the competence of commercial operators was variable, although the average quality of Spanish portraiture seems to have been high.

Many professionals also moved into the celebrity portrait and art reproduction markets. Much late 19th-century non-portrait work was related to the latter, and to illustrated book publishing. Particularly spectacular was the output of the Madrid-based French photographer Jean Laurent (1816-c.1892). After an initial catalogue of 1863 containing a few hundred photographs of works of art in Spain (mainly painting, architecture, and monumental or urban views), Laurent assembled a large archive of negatives, and by the 1890s had thousands of items on offer. His firm, J. Laurent y Cia, had a shop in Paris and a European-wide distribution network. (Under subsequent owners, the Laurent archive remained active until around the mid-1970s.) On a smaller scale, several Spanish photographers followed in Laurent's footsteps: for example, Casiano Alguacil Blázquez (1832-1914) in Toledo, A. Esplugas in Barcelona, the Beauchy family in Seville, and Eusebio Juliá (1826-c.1890) in Madrid. Such enterprises contributed significantly to knowledge of classic Spanish art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Spain's history, topography, and cultural heritage increasingly attracted visitors from all over the world. Commercial and amateur photographers toured the country to record the main cities and art treasures; Burgos, Madrid, El Escorial, Granada, and Seville were featured in the core itineraries. Of cities, Seville probably attracted the most photographers; the Alhambra in Granada was Spain's most-photographed individual monument. Prominent among 19th-century visitors, lured by the fabulous—and, it was feared, disappearing—remnants of a glorious past, were Eugène Piot (1812-91), who arrived in 1840 with the writer Théophile Gautier; Edmond Jomard, who contributed a few Spanish views to N. M. P. Lerebours's Excursions daguerriennes (1840-4); the Irish photographer Edward King Tension, who produced a set of extraordinary calotypes c.1851-2; Gustave de Beaucorps in 1858 and Louis de Clercq in 1863, en route to Africa and beyond. For commercial purposes, Francis Frith, James Valentine (both using hired operators), and Jules Levi obtained large numbers of Spanish views. Of resident foreigners, other than Laurent, the key figure was the Welshman Charles Clifford (1819-63), whose output between 1850 and 1862 at least equalled in quality anything else produced there in the 19th century.

By the turn of the 20th century, alongside industrial and social modernization, the availability of dry plates, roll-film, and hand-held cameras facilitated the growth of amateur photography. Salons and photographic magazines became popular in the larger cities and even outside them. But most materials were imported, and the local photographic industry never captured a significant share of the market. Photographic practice remained rather exclusive, which kept costs high and gave the medium an elitist, aesthetically conservative aura. The debates surrounding pictorialism—mainly as to whether or how far the negative should be manipulated—centred on the newly formed photographic societies. The most important was Madrid's Photographic Society, which from 1904 produced an influential bulletin, edited by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (Kâulak).

Some modernist movements, and many talented individuals, worked their way round ‘official’ artistic trends. Artistic movements in early 20th-century Spain mainly followed European and American trends. However, in different regional and social contexts, their impact varied considerably. The movements imbued with the spirit of the Generación del 98 first and the Novecentistas later (especially in Catalonia) substantially influenced Spain's otherwise not very dynamic art photography. In the 1920s Catalonia's highly developed graphic tradition certainly impacted on the region's photographic scene. Many Catalan Nouvecentistes sought to renew prevailing intellectual and aesthetic conventions, and to launch a new era of Spanish art, one that would be dramatically interrupted by the coming of civil war in 1936. Until then, many Spanish photographers would be involved in the Nouvecentistes movements, and between 1927 and 1930, when Joaquin Pla Janini (1879-1970) was president of the Agrupación Fotográfica de Catalunya, some, including Rafael Areñas Tonà, Antoni Arissa, and Claudi Carbonel, would achieve international exposure and recognition.

But between 1936 and 1939 the Civil War drove talent into either the propaganda machines or exile. The conflict was covered on an unprecedented scale in the international illustrated press, although both at the time and later a disproportionate amount of glory went to foreigners like Capa rather than to Spanish photographers, who took most of the casualties. In the war's immediate aftermath the economy could hardly sustain even minimal photographic activity, commercial or creative, and it was not until the mid-1950s that recovery began. In the meantime, both during and for a long time after the Civil War, Spain's most prominent photographer remained the conservative pictorialist José Ortiz-Echaguë. As autarky was dismantled, however the photographic scene revived; some strong local photographic industries emerged (but would disappear in the late 1980s); and, c. 1960, photography became popular with both ordinary consumers and a new generation of aspiring ‘authorial’ photographers. Key events of the 1970s included the founding of the magazine Nueva lente (1971); the opening of the Spectrum Gallery in Barcelona (1973), followed by similar initiatives; and the inauguration, in 1974, of the Photocentro in Madrid. May 1980 brought the first Week of Spanish Photography in Barcelona, a festival that was repeated every 2-3 years thereafter. By this time, against the background of political democratization and Spain's entry into the EEC (1984), photographic culture had come to conform to general Western trends.

In the 21st century, photography in Spain is a major visual medium, fully accepted as a means of expression. Exhibitions and festivals are numerous and popular, especially with the young. However, the development of an art photography market has been limited, and only a few institutions promote the study of photographic history or photography as an art form. Digital photography has had a seismic impact on the Spanish photographic scene, and become central to photographic creation and debate.

— Gerardo F. Kurtz

Bibliography

• Fontanella, L., Historia de la fotografia en España, desde sus origenes hasta 1900 (1981).
• López Mondéjar, P., Fotografia y sociedad en la España del siglo XIX (1989).
• Cuatro direcciones: fotografia contemporánea española, 1970-1990 (2 vols., 1991).
• López Mondéjar, P., Fotografia y sociedad en España, 1900-1939 (1992).
• López Mondéjar, P., Fotografia y sociedad en la España de Franco, trans.
• Watson, L., Photography in Franco's Spain (1996).
• López Mondéjar, P., Historia de la fotografia en España (c. 1997).
• Fontcuberta, J., De la posguerra al siglo XXI (2001)

Spanish dance tended to adhere to its own traditions during the 19th and much of the 20th century, rather than slavishly following the ballet trends set by the rest of Europe. The dominant dance form was escuela bolera which dated from the early 19th century and fused Spanish dance forms like the bolero and the cachucha with elements from French ballet. During the second half of the 19th century flamenco began to change from an intimate social dance to a professional artform with the establishment of performances in clubs and bars. Some foreign ballet was presented in major theatres and the Teatro del Licea in Barcelona and the Teatro Real in Madrid had corps de ballet, while the Real ran its own ballet school. Few permanent professional companies were founded during this period but several individual performers emerged as stars on the international scene. One of the most famous was Buenos Aires-born Antonia Mercé who called herself La Argentina. She trained as a classical dancer and became prima ballerina of the Royal Opera Theatre, Real Madrid, in 1899 at the age of 11. At 14 she gave up classical dance and studied traditional Spanish dance with her mother, after which she began touring the world as a concert artist, displaying an extraordinary castanet technique, and using largely Spanish music. In 1928 she formed her own company and choreographed several ballets on Spanish themes. European and American audiences at this time were fascinated by Spanish dance and culture. Massine's popular Le Tricorne (1919), with its flamenco-inspired choreography and music by de Falla, was widely performed and the Ballet de Madrid, founded in 1927 by Encarnacion López Julvez (who called herself La Argentinita in homage to Mercé) with Federico García Lorca, scored a huge success in New York during 1928. In 1933 La Argentinita attempted the first large-scale theatrical presentation of authentic flamenco in Las calles de Cadiz and in 1939 she collaborated with Massine on Capriccio espagnol. Her sister, Pilar López danced in her company and after the latter's death in 1946 López created her own company, Ballet Espagnol, with José Greco. She trained a new generation of male dancers who in turn left to form their own companies. José Greco launched a company in America with his wife Nila Amparo which toured widely and also established a Foundation of Spanish Dance in America. Antonio Gades, who also danced with López, trained in both Spanish and classical dance and collaborated with Dolin in creating Bolero for Rome Opera. In 1964 he set up his own company which blended Spanish idioms with modern and classical dance.

Other international stars were gypsy-born Carmen Amaya who toured the world with a company drawn from her relatives between the late 1920s and 1940s, and the two cousins Antonio and Rosario who also danced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1950. In 1953 Antonio formed his own Spanish ballet company, Antonio and the Ballets de Madrid. More recently Cristina Hoyos, originally a dancer with Gades, has formed her own renowned flamenco company, which along with the government-sponsored Cumbre Flamenco has generated a new international vogue for gypsy-style flamenco. Joaquín Cortés has drawn new audiences with his fusion of flamenco and rock, as has Sara Baras (b 1971) with her contemporary virtuoso style. The first government-sponsored Spanish company to operate on a permanent basis was the National Dance Company of Spain (replacing the Ballet Antología Española), founded in 1978, under Gades, for the performance of Spanish dance, and now known as the National Ballet of Spain. There have been recent attempts to establish a classical dance culture in Spain but they have been slow to take off. Ballet Clásico was founded in 1979, becoming Ballet Lírico Nacional, but under the direction of Nacho Duato since 1990 the repertory has become exclusively contemporary and has been renamed Compañia Nacional de Danza. The chamber ensemble Ballet de Zaragoza performs some classics, such as The Nutcracker and Coppélia, alongside 20th-century ballets but has faced possible closure. In 1997, however, Victor Ullate's company became resident at the newly rebuilt Opera House in Madrid, officially called Ballet de la Comunidad de Madrid but better known as Ballet Ullate, performing neo-classical and classical works. Ullate, who has run a school in Madrid since 1979, has nurtured some fine dancers, including Angel Corella and Tamara Rojo, though most have tended to move elsewhere. The country's most energetic area of growth has been in modern dance as a new generation of choreographers has begun to look outside Spain. Companies like Danat Danza, Mal Pelo, Lanonima Impérial, and Cia. Vicente Saez have all gained international reputations.

Since there were no notable compilers of fairy tales in Spain like the Brothers Grimm, these fanciful narratives must be sought either in isolated texts or in literary allusions to familiar tales. Although the universally recognized stories of ‘Cenicienta’ (‘Cinderella’), ‘Blanca Nieve’ (‘Snow White’), ‘La bella durmiente’ (‘Sleeping Beauty’) ‘Caperucita Roja’ (‘Little Red Riding Hood’), and ‘Los niños abandonados’ (‘Hansel and Gretel’) have been circulating in Spain and in Latin America for some time now, it is not clear when they became part of the native canon of wonder tales.

1. The 11th century to the 17th century

Nevertheless, Spain produced its share of wonder tales, some of which reflect the 800‐year Arab presence in the Iberian peninsula. An important collection of tales of Arabic origin is Disciplina Clericalis, translated into Latin by Moisés Sefardí (born in Huesca in 1056, converted, christened Petrus Alphonsi in 1106). In ‘The Rustic and the Bird’ a man captures a bird. To gain her freedom she gives him some words of advice: ‘Do not believe everything that is said’ (a precious stone in her body), ‘what is yours you will always possess’ (she is in the sky; he cannot possess her), ‘do not sorrow over lost possessions’ (he must not lament loss of the stone). This tale was disseminated widely with variants and was interpolated in a chivalric text, in a translation of the life of Buddha, and in a compilation of sermonic exempla. Also from Disciplina is the tale of ‘Dream Bread’ (whose literary trajectory led it to the Golden Age dramatist Lope de Vega's San Isidro labrador de Madrid, 1599), in which a clever rustic tricks his urban travelling companions by pretending to have had a miraculous dream.

Fadrique, Alfonso X's brother, was the patron in 1253 for a translation of another Arabic text, Seven Sages (modern Spanish title Sendebar). Sendebar includes three tales set in a perilous forest: ‘The Hunter and the She‐Devil’, ‘The Three Wishes’, and ‘Spring that Changes Prince into a Woman’. The common element is a prince or nobleman who leaves home to go hunting and comes to grief in a forest.

In another Arabic text, Kalila and Dimna (translated as Calila e Dimna by order of Alfonso X, 1221–84), a sage leaves home on a quest. He journeys to India seeking a resuscitative herb. The topic reappears in a 13th‐century poem, Razón de amor, in which the scent of magical flowers in an enchanted meadow will revive the dead. Calila contains two transformation tales. In ‘The Rat Maiden’ a monk raises a tiny rat and prays that she be transformed into a young woman. Old enough to wed, she wants the most powerful mate of all. He offers her the sun, but it is covered by clouds; the clouds are controlled by winds; a mountain blocks the winds, but the mountain is gnawed by rodents. Therefore, she must marry a rat. He prays that she will return to her previous shape. In ‘The Frog‐King's Mount’, a serpent's arrogance is punished by a transformation into serving as a frog‐king's mount, condemned to eat only those frogs given him by the king.

A chivalric novel, Cavallero Zifar (1300, translated as The Book of the Knight in 1983) strings together a number of fairy tales. The good knight's adventures begin when he is unable to serve any royal master for long because he had been cursed. Any horse or other beast that served him as a mount dies after ten days (‘Equine Curse’). He seeks a new post repeatedly since he represents a considerable expense for his royal masters. One day a son is carried off by a lioness, nurtured by her until he is adopted by kind strangers (‘Child Nurtured by Lioness’). His wife, captured by pirates, defeats her captors, throws their corpses overboard, and sails magically to a safe port. In another episode Zifar's squire becomes a knight, and is lured into the underwater realm of the ‘Lady of the Lake’, whom he marries. His fairy wife orders him not to speak to anyone in her realm. He disobeys the interdiction. In this land parturition follows conception by seven days. Fruit trees bear fruit every day, and beasts have young every seven days. Having violated her interdiction against speech, he and his adult son are ejected violently from his underworld kingdom soon after his arrival. In a parallel episode, Zifar's son, Roboán, is at the court of the emperor of Tigrida, a monarch who never laughs. Roboán is punished for asking why the emperor does not laugh. He is set adrift in an oarless, rudderless boat to a magic kingdom, the Fortunate Isles. There he is chosen by the empress, Nobility, to be the emperor with the understanding that if he completes a year successfully on the throne, he will never lose the empire. Three days before his year ends, an enchantress seduces him with a magical mastiff, an enchanted hawk, and finally a horse that can outrun the wind. Mounted on the magical horse faster than the wind, he touches its flanks lightly with his spurs, and the horse carries him away from his empire back to Tigrida. There he learns that he and the doleful emperor were two in a long succession of unlucky men who had lost the empire of the Fortunate Isles in the same demonic way.

In the chivalric novel Amadís de Gaula (1508) lovers are tested for constancy and nobility in another enchanted kingdom (Ínsola Firme). Before the noble Apolidon and his bride Grimanesa leave their enchanted realm, they must select successors who match them in nobility, skill in arms, and in governance as well as in physical beauty and loving constancy. As a test they build an enchanted arch leading to four chambers. Unworthy pairs passing under the arch are ejected by a horrific mechanical trumpeter and terrible flames and smoke. The same trumpeter plays wonderfully sweet music for the deserving couple, Amadís and Oriana. An evil enchanter, Arcalaus, disguised as a mysterious stranger, devises a test to tempt Amadís and Oriana to come out of hiding. Two magnificent gifts are offered: a magic sword that can be taken from its sheath only by a lover whose devotion to his beloved is greater than any other's in the world, and a headdress adorned with flowers that will bloom only when worn by a woman whose devotion to her beloved equals his. To counter the efforts of Arcalaus, a good enchantress, Urganda the Unknown, guides and protects Amadís throughout his life. Every time he needs her help she appears. Similarly, the evil enchanter, Arcalaus, appears when the storyteller needs a limit to his hero's almost unlimited powers; for example, he tricks Amadís into entering an enchanted chamber whose power causes him to faint and appear to die. Arcalaus comes to court to trick King Lisuarte into permitting him to wed Oriana. He lends the king two magical objects: a crown that guarantees its wearer perpetual honour and power, and an enchanted cloak for the queen that ensures that there can never be discord between the wearer and her mate. They may retain the gifts until Arcalaus comes to claim them. If for any reason Lisuarte cannot return them, he must promise to grant him whatever he wants. The evil enchanter sends an emissary to the queen for the crown and cloak, and then comes in person to claim the missing items. Unable to return them, Lisuarte must surrender his only daughter Oriana to the evil magician.

A traditional paradisaical land of abundance, La Tierra de Jauja, where the streets are paved with eggs and sweets, rivers run with wine and honey, roast partridges fly by with tortillas in their beaks saying ‘Eat Me’ is described by Luis Barahona de Soto (1548–95) in Diálogo de la montería (also in Lope de Rueda's La Tierra de Jauja, 1547). Mateo de Alemán alludes to this territory in the picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache, as does Fray Juan de Pineda in Diálogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana (1589).

Heroes kill two grotesque, horrific monsters, another feature of fairy tales. One in Amadís is the hideous fruit of an incestuous union between the giant Bandaguido and his daughter Bandaguida, and the other is a fearsome dragon said to have consumed a whole town, in the crusade narrative Gran Conquista de Ultramar. In a ballad, a dragon abducts a princess (‘El culebro raptor’), and in another a seven‐headed serpent gnaws at a penitent sinner (‘Penitencia del rey don Rodrigo’). The fantasy of a grotesque mountain woman, who preys on travellers, appears in many tales. Her horrible nature is best described, in a ballad, as a lamia with the head and breast of a woman and the body of a serpent (‘La Gallarda, matadora’).

Time is manipulated magically in many ballads and tales. In a ballad, a captive's magic sleep makes him think only minutes have passed. In reality seven years have gone by (‘El conde Arnaldos’). In prose this motif occurred in the tale of ‘Don Illán and the Dean of Santiago’ in El Conde Lucanor (1335) by Don Juan Manuel (1282–1347). In a 15th‐century compilation of sermonic exempla a friar follows a bird to paradise and returns 100 years later (Libro de los enxenplos por a.b.c. by Clemente Sánchez de Vercial, 1370–1426, translated as The Book of Tales by A.B.C. in 1992). In the most famous Golden Age drama, La vida es sueño (1631–2), Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81) has his hero Segismundo fall into a magic time‐distorting sleep.

Storytellers interpolated fairy tales in larger narratives. The Libro de Apolonio (1235–40) begins with a princess who is the prize offered to the solver of a hermetic riddle. In Gran conquista de Ultramar (1295–1312), ‘The Swan Knight’ is inserted into a crusade story. Princess Isomberta's family arranges a marriage for her, and she escapes in a rudderless boat without sails. She lands on a deserted island where Count Eustacio finds her in a hollow tree. He is uneasy about this strange apparition and consults his mother Ginesa about marriage to her. His mother disapproves, but they wed anyway. While Eustacio is away Isomberta has seven babies. Multiple births were thought to be results of adulterous behaviour, but an angel comes to save her and the babies putting a gold collar on each child. Ginesa orders a servant to kill the children, but he takes them to a wilderness and abandons them. A deer nurses them until a hermit adopts them and raises them. Ginesa spies six of the boys, takes them to her palace, and orders her servants to kill them, but first to remove their collars. Their collars removed, the boys turn into swans and fly away. She takes the gold (silver) to a metalworker who melts it and makes a goblet. He keeps the metal from the five collars since one suffices for the goblet. When their father learns the truth, the five remaining collars are restored. The seventh lad, still wearing his collar and accompanied by his swan brother, spends his life defending those who need him, including his calumniated mother. When he marries, he imposes an interdiction on his bride. She may never ask him for his name, nor his origin. If she does, he must leave forever, carried away by his swan brother.

Sometimes fairy tales leave only traces of themselves in the form of allusions. Allusive passages in literary works are signs that the tale had spread widely enough in the community to be familiar to the average reader. For instance, the anonymous author of a 16th‐century picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes alluded to an Arabic tale ‘The House Where No One Eats Nor Drinks’ in a chapter where his hero serves an impoverished squire. Cervantes refers to the ‘Frogs who asked Jupiter for a King’ and the ‘Princess Rescued by a Half‐Man, Half‐Bear’ in Don Quixote. Later Fernán Caballero (pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber) and Alonso de Morales related the same story as ‘Las princesas encantadas’.

Many stories like ‘The Tale of a Youth who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was’ were part of Spain's cultural heritage (Quinquagenas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, 1478–1557). Lope de Vega (1562–1635) alluded to it in two dramas (Los porceles de Murcia, c.1604–8), Quien ama no haga fiero, c.1620–2), and later Juan de Ariza wrote a story ‘Perico sin Miedo’ (1848).

While the interest for the modern reader of the antonomastic lover, Don Juan, is his indefatigable pursuit of women, in El burlador de Sevilla, the public for Tirso de Molina (pseudonym of Friar Gabriel Téllez, 1571–1648) was more concerned with his lack of repentance as evidenced in his invitation to dinner to the dead Comendador's statue, a situation paralleled in the tale of ‘The Skull Invited to Dinner’. Antonio de Zamora (1664–1728) wrote a version No hay plazo que no se cumpla, ni deuda que no se pague, y convidado de piedra (No Agreement Goes Unfulfilled, nor Any Debt Unpaid). A dead person grants good fortune to his benefactor and returns to demand the reward promised him in Lope de Vega's Don Juan de Castro (c.1604–8), a theme also used by Calderón in El mejor amigo el muerto (1636).

Similarly, proverbs that enjoyed popular currency are evidence that the tales to which they refer existed in the oral tradition. For example, a fanciful story tells of an encounter between a giant who reproached Pedro de Urdimales when he tried to carry off a mountain full of firewood, telling him to be satisfied with one tree. A 17th‐century proverb collection lists the tale's echo, ‘Pedro de Urdimales, o todo el monte, o nonada’ (‘Either the Whole Mountain or Nothing’).

Another source of information about fairy tales is the oral‐traditional ballad. These brief narratives were first written down in the 16th century, but it was not until 1832 that Agustín Durán published his Romancero general and Ferdinand Wolf and Conrad Hoffman collected them in Primavera y flor de romances (1856). Among these popular narratives, we find the tale of a hunter who comes upon an enchanted princess in a tree. Like the princess in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (‘Briar Rose’) she had been cursed at birth by one of seven fairies who had come to bring her gifts. She was compelled to spend seven years in an enchanted tree. Like the count in the ‘Swan Knight’ story, the frightened hunter must first consult his mother (aunt) before he can agree (‘La infantina’). In variant versions, he makes sexual demands on her. She reveals she is the Virgin Mary (‘El caballero burlado a lo divino’). In another ballad he comes upon a magical dove and promises that her offspring and his will be brothers and sisters (‘El mal cazador’). In still another, a deer is really an enchanted princess who asks him to marry her (‘La niña encantada’).

A serpent appears to a woman at a fountain. He is a king enchanted for six years (‘La inocente acusada’). In a Portuguese ballad, a man falls in love with a Moorish woman in a castle. He captures the castle, but she disappears magically (‘A moura encantada’). Echoing the experience of the ‘Bold Knight’ and Prince Roboán, a fairy takes her lover to her bed in a far‐off land and keeps him enchanted. He has a son with her (‘Los amores de Floriseo y de la reina de Bohemia’). Extraordinary people are said to be other‐worldly. A man whose beauty rivals the stars causes the goddess of beauty to fall in love with him (‘Romance del infante Troco’).

Strange, magical happenings are often associated with the sea. A sailor's song calms the sea and the winds, causes fish to leap out of water, and birds to perch on a ship's mast (‘El conde Arnaldos’). The protagonist of several ballads travels in a magic boat. Just as in the chivalric novel El caballero Zifar, in which the knight's wife single‐handedly steers a boat whose sails fill miraculously and whose rudder takes her to a safe harbour, a galley without sails and oars is invincible in battle (‘La toma de Galera’). In a Portuguese ballad, an exiled woman returns home in a boat without sails (‘A filha desterrada’). Hero seeks Leander in a boat using her sleeves as sails, and her arms as oars (‘Hero y Leandro’). Reminiscent of Rapunzel, imprisoned in a tower, Leander lets down her long hair so that her lover can climb (‘Hero y Leandro’), and still another woman uses her long tresses as a lifeline for a drowning man (‘Repulsa y compasión’).

Other unusual objects have migrated from fairy tales to ballad narratives. A gigantic sapphire adorns a castle tower and illuminates the area, promising marvellous events. Night becomes day (‘Romance de Rosaflorida’). A magic sword promises that the hero need only brandish it to cut a swath through the enemy ranks (‘El conde Niño’). Just as fairy‐tale objects had migrated to ballads, they also made their way into prose narratives. Cervantes alluded to magic wands in two of his Exemplary Novels: El casamiento engaños (The Deceitful Marriage) and Los baños de Argel (The Bagnios of Algiers).

Magic animals figure in many ballads. A marauding deer leads seven lions and a lioness to kill knights and their horses (‘Romance de Lanzarote’). A speaking horse will aid the hero if given winesop and not fodder (‘Gaiferos libera a Melisendra’), ‘Pérdida de don Beltrán’, ‘Passo de Roncesval’, ‘Conde Olinos’). Birds carry messages from captives to their potential rescuers (‘El Conde Claros en hábito de fraile’; ‘La esposa de D. García’). Another bird warns men not to trust women (‘La tórtola del peral’). A dove sustains a shepherdess for seven years with a magic flower (‘A pastora devota de María’, ‘La devota del rosario’). Problem pregnancies in ballads are attributed to inhaling the magic fragrance of some flowers or treading upon magic grass (‘Romance de don Tristan’, ‘La mala hierba’).

2. The 18th century

As far as fairy tales are concerned in Spanish literature, the 18th century constitutes a tremendous gap; the almost total absence of fantasy short narrative in that period comes to an end in the next century. However, before exploring the main tendencies and writers of the Märchen in the 19th century, it is worth recounting the reasons why the Spanish Age of Reason showed such a negative attitude towards a genre that was otherwise profusely used in neighbouring countries, above all in France.

In 18th‐century Spanish literature, both the short novel and the short story failed to develop any degree of quality, and therefore they offer little interest to contemporary readers and scholars. Writers of the 18th century tended to devote their talents to other genres. While scarcely any attention was paid to short narrative genres, the Spanish literary heritage was enriched by many a writer's devotion to such genres as diaries, travel literature, speeches, journalistic essays, and utopias, as the critic Esther Lacadena Calero has pointed out.

According to Juan Antonio Ríos Carratala, one of the reasons why imaginative narrative genres were neglected in 18th‐century Spain is that an omnipresent censorship controlled all kinds of publications and was especially vigilant with respect to periodicals and translations, mainly from French into Spanish. Such censorship, of both a civil and a religious nature, made it very difficult for editors to publish unauthorized works; however, there were some exceptions to this. Mariano José Nipho, for example, was an editor who went against the grain, supporting several publications which regularly published short narratives and some moralistic tales addressed to a female reading public.

Ríos Carratala also affirms that short narratives were despised by most important literary figures of the period as non‐respectable genres, on the basis that they lacked the support of a classical literary tradition. Moreover, the same critic points out that literary theorists and writers of the time showed great mistrust of pure fiction; for them, literature had to play a moral and instructive role that short narratives of a fictitious nature could never perform, since they were considered to be simply destined to entertain their readers.

Despite the forces working against the development of short narrative in 18th‐century Spain, some examples of it can still be traced. Thus, Professor Antonio Fernández Insuela of the University of Oviedo (Spain) studied the small corpus of short narrative publications in the 18th century, particularly in Tertulia de la aldea (A Village Literary Gathering). This journal was structured in several sections, one of which included brief texts under the heading of ‘tales’, ‘jokes’, ‘sayings’, ‘funny stories’, etc., which had a historical or pseudo‐historical origin and also sometimes a traditional or folk one. Ríos Carratala (1993) mentions yet another 18th‐century periodical which gave some attention to the short‐story genre: El Correo de Madrid (The Madrid Post). In this periodical, apart from some moralistic stories, jokes, and anecdotes, it was likewise possible to read brief tales with a folk source.

3. The 19th century

With the advent of the 19th century, the situation of short narratives radically changed. In fact, it was during this century that the short story became an autonomous literary genre. Excellent examples of short narrative were produced at the time, and most of the great literary figures of the century tried their hand at writing short stories. It is Ríos Carratala (1993) again who best summarizes the reasons why this change took place. First of all, he mentions the end of censorship during the 1830s. Secondly, he points out the enormous development of the press, since it benefited all literary genres, particularly the short story. In fact, the 19th‐century short story was almost always initially published in literary sections of periodicals. Throughout the 19th century the short story gained a degree of acceptance that it had lacked in the past; moreover, it received some critical attention, this being especially true in the case of the literary tale based on folk material.

One aspect concerning the short stories produced in 19th‐century Spanish literature is that they can be categorized according to many different types, as Baquero Goyanes has demonstrated in his seminal study El cuento español en el siglo XIX (The Spanish Short Story in the 19th Century, 1949). Some of the categories that he has distinguished are: literary versions of folk tales, fantastic tales, children's tales (in which the main character is a child), legendary tales, rural tales, historical and patriotic tales, religious tales, and humoristic and satiric tales. It is worth pointing out for our purposes that literary versions of folk tales were not often cultivated by Spanish 19th‐century writers. In fact, Baquero Goyanes is quite convinced that this category might just be comprised of Cecilia Böhl de Faber's works as well as those of a couple of her followers, Antonio de Trueba (1819–89) and Luis Coloma (1851–1914).

Nevertheless, it would seem that the list of 19th‐century Spanish writers who appropriated folk material for their literary purposes could be further expanded so as to include the names of those who, in the history of Spanish literature, tend to figure prominently in categories distinct from that of the literary folk tradition. This would be the case of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, generally regarded among the ranks of the naturalist school; Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, who is otherwise grouped with romantic novelists; and writers like José María de Pereda, Armando Palacio Valdés, and Benito Pérez Galdós, who were part of the realist tradition; all of these writers cultivated to some degree the genre of the literary fairy tale. Furthermore 19th‐century scholars and journalists such as Manuel Ossorio y Bernard and José Godoy Alcántara can be added to the list, as can Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, the famous romantic playwright. Mainly known for his poetry, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer nevertheless should be accorded a place within the history of the Spanish literary tale on account of his Leyendas (Legends, 1871), for which he drew motifs from Spanish legends as well as from the European folk tradition. A special case is that of Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’; he was not a writer of literary fairy tales himself, but was none the less a major defender of the genre, and was also responsible for some of the best short stories of the 19th century.

There were no notable compilers of fairy tales like the Grimm brothers in Spain; yet, it should be pointed out that the romantic impulse to collect folk tales systematically did produce some outstanding results, if not as noteworthy as those gathered in Germany. Cecilia Böhl de Faber, generally referred to by her male pseudonym ‘Fernán Caballero’, is the most important figure to have transformed this impulse into an actual compilation of folk stories entitled Cuentos y poesías populares andaluzas (Popular Andalusian Tales and Poems, 1859). Her project was not as ambitious as that of the Grimms', since she did not aim at gathering folk tales from the whole of Spain, but only from one of its regions, Andalusia. However, like the Grimms she transcribed the stories she collected from different folk sources and subsequently adapted them to her own literary taste.

4. the 20th century

In the 20th century it becomes much more difficult to make a comprehensive analysis of literature written in Spanish owing to the influence of other cultures and literatures. In fact, after gaining their independence, all South American countries began to develop their own sense of identity, out of which new forms of literature grew.

At the turn of the century, two writers figure prominently in Spain: Pío Baroja and the Nobel Prize‐winner Jacinto Benavente. As was the trend in the 19th century, neither of them was associated explicitly with the fairy‐tale genre, but both had some connection to it. Baroja, one of the greatest contemporary Spanish novelists, wrote some short narratives of a fantastic nature akin to those by Edgar Allan Poe, while Benavente's plays for children were almost always inspired by one classical fairy tale or another.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, however, a good number of writers began to devote themselves more specifically to the fairy‐tale genre. It should be noted that many of them were women writers who had in mind an adolescent audience, or who were simply writing for children. Thus appeared collections of fairy stories by writers like María Luisa Gefaell, Concha Castroviejo, María Luisa Villardefrancos, and Elizabeth Mulder. During these decades of Franco's dictatorship, the fairy tale was often used to convey a traditional ideology that was being promoted by the followers of the regime. The girls' magazine Bazar, for instance, was intended to inculcate in its readers an ideal of femininity characterized by docility, passivity, and piety. It promoted a kind of woman who had no other interests beyond household and marital duties, whose body was to conform to canonical beauty, and who duly fulfilled the precepts of Catholicism. Aurora Mateos, for years the editor of Bazar, made sure that one or several fairy tales imbued with such an ideology filled some of the pages of each issue.

For the most part, the approach to folk and fairy‐tale materials underwent a dramatic change from the 1970s onwards in Spain, although examples can still be found, such as that of Ana María Matute, of writers who venerate the established fairy‐tale canon and do not wish to subvert it. With the beginnings of democracy, the censorship imposed by the Franco regime was brought to an end, with the result that many themes, until then considered taboo, could be freely dealt with in literature. Fairy‐tale material was used in works that tried to deconstruct traditional discourses concerning the national past, Catholic morals and manners, and a good number of sexual taboos, as in Juan Goytisolo's work. Feminist ideology was also soon easily identifiable in much of post‐Franco literature, and feminist writers were often inspired by the genre of the fairy tale, as is the case of a good number of Sara Suárez Solís's short stories, and also of Carmen Martín Gaite's novels and fairy tales; some famous publishing houses even produced whole collections in which the best‐known traditional fairy tales were rewritten with a feminist bias, of which the series ‘The Three Twins’, published by Planeta, is an excellent example.

Feminist revision of fairy tales is a phenomenon that has likewise affected the production of several Latin American writers from the 1970s onwards. The Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré, Luisa Valenzuela, and Marco Denevi, both Argentinian, figure among those writers who have used fairy‐tale material in their short stories in order to socialize their reading public according to values other than the patriarchal ones, or at least, to make their readers conscious of the patriarchal ideology inscribed in many traditional narratives.

In Chile, during Salvador Allende's presidency (1970–3) a publishing house called Quimantú working under the auspices of the Unidad Popular (Allende's political party) published Cabrochico (Small Child), a children's magazine in which several classical fairy tales appeared; they were all refashioned according to the socialist ideology that the leaders of the country wanted to disseminate.

Leaving aside the socializing aim which fairy stories have often been intended to fulfil in contemporary South American literature, what is undeniable about the genre is that it has ignited such movements as magical realism in Spanish. Moreover, in the case of the short story, a number of South American writers are reputed to have produced the best examples of the literary fairy tale in the Spanish language. The three names most often cited are: Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and above all Jorge Luis Borges. In their works, folk and fairy‐tale material are intertwined with features borrowed from the genres of the fantastic and magic realism, the fundamental South American contribution to contemporary world literature. Borges, one of the best short‐story writers in the Spanish language, adds yet another element to his literary production—the inspired touch of The Arabian Nights, the masterpiece which influences almost all of his works.

Bibliography

• Baquero Goyanes, Mariano, El cuento español en el siglo XIX (1949).
• ––El cuento español. Del Romanticismo al Realismo (1992).
• Boggs, Ralph Steele, Index of Spanish Folktales (1930).
• Bravo‐Villasante, Carmen, Historia de la literatura infantil española (1972).
• ––Antología de la literatura infantil española (1979).
• Cerda, Hugo, Ideología y cuentos de hadas (1985).
• Chevalier, Maxime, Cuentos folkoricos españoles del Siglo de Oro (1983).
• ––Cuentos maravillosos, Biblioteca Románica Hispánica (1995).
• Espinosa, Aurelio, The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest: Traditional Spanish Folk Literature in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado (1985).
• Fernández Insuela, Antonio, ‘Notas sobre la narrativa breve en las publicaciones periódicas del siglo XVIII: Estudio de la Tertulia de la aldea’, Estudios de historia social, 52–3 (1990).
• Garcia Collado, Marian, ‘El cuento folklorico y sus adaptaciones: Entre la tradición oral y la fijación escrita. Tres apropiaciones del cuento “Juan el oso” (cuento tipo AT 301b)’, Revista de Dialectologla y Tradiciones Populares, 47 (1992).
• Goldberg, Harriet, Motif‐Index of Medieval Spanish Narrative (1998).
• Lacadena Calero, Esther, La prosa en el siglo XVIII (1985).
• Ríos Carratala, Juan Antonio, “‘La narrativa breve en España (siglos XVIII y XIX)’”, in J. L. Alonso Hernández, M. Gosman, and R. Rinaldi (eds.), La Nouvelle Romane (Italia–France–España) (1993).

— Harriet Goldberg/Carolina Fernandez

Spain (Gk. Ibēria, from the name of the river Ibērus, Ebro; Lat. Hispania). From earliest times the races of Spain have been mixed; peoples arriving from Africa in Neolithic times (to exploit the mineral resources) spread throughout the south and east, mixing in the centre and west with Celts invading from the north in the late Bronze and early Iron Ages. According to tradition, Phoenicians from Tyre discovered Tartessus and colonized Gades c.1100 BC. In the third century BC the Carthaginians under Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, and Hannibal conquered much of Spain, but the Romans, under Scipio Africanus, drove them out of the country (206) during the Second Punic War. Two Roman provinces were established in Spain in 197. They comprised at first only a relatively small portion of the peninsula, and were known as Hispania Citerior, ‘Hither Spain’, the eastern seaboard, and Hispania Ulterior, ‘Further Spain’, roughly modern Andalusia. But the native population had not then been effectively subdued, and unrest continued for many years. An important pacification was brought about in 179 by Ti. Sempronius Gracchus (father of the Gracchi), who by his personal character won the confidence of the Spaniards. But native risings were renewed in 154, and Numantia resisted the Romans for nine years. Its capture by Scipio Aemilianus in 133 brought the Spanish wars to a close, the Romans then occupying about two thirds of the peninsula, failing to hold only the mountainous region in the north and north-west.

In the civil wars of the first century BC Spain was held by the Marian leader Sertorius against the party of Sulla, and later against Pompey, until Sertorius was murdered in 72. The military talent of Julius Caesar was first revealed when he was propraetor in Spain in 61. He subsequently waged war there in 49 against the Pompeian generals Afranius and Petreius, and in 45 against the sons of Pompey, finally making himself master of the Roman empire by his victory at Munda. Notable among the colonies that he founded were Hispalis (Seville) and Tarraco (Tarragona). A final pacification of the whole peninsula, including the north and north-west, was achieved by the emperor Augustus.

In literature, Spanish colonies produced the two Senecas and Lucan; Columella, Quintilian, and Martial came from native stock. The emperor Trajan was born in Spain, and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius belonged to Spanish families. The Frankish invasions of the early third century AD severely disrupted northern Spain, but a strong Christian church emerged in the fourth century, inspiring the works of Prudentius and Orosius; it survived the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, and converted the Visigothic kings to Christianity. The seventh-century bishop of Seville, Isidore, was an important link in continuity between classical culture and the Middle Ages.