Speak the Culture: Spain: Be Fluent in Spanish Life and Culture

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1. Identity: the
   building blocks of
   2. Literature
   and philosophy
   3. Art and
   architecture
   4. Performing
   arts
   5. Cinema
   and fashion
   6. Media and
   communications
   7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
   the details of

Picking over the bones: prehistoric Spain

The accomplished cave paintings of Altamira, Cantabria,

confirm that Stone Age man was alive and well fed in

northern Iberia around 15,000 years ago. However,

fossilised bones and stone tools found in the limestone

caves of the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Castile y

León suggest that Europe’s earliest residents made

Spain a first stop on the journey from Africa some

800,000 years earlier. It seems likely that the Iberian

Peninsula later became the last European refuge for

Neanderthals.

Cultivating civilisation: Neolithic Spain

As modern man added farming to his resumé, Spain

saw a busy period of colonisation during which cultures

emerged, peaked and then declined. Enter, for instance,

the Beaker Folk, cup-loving people who colonised much

of Europe in the third millennium BC.The arrival of the

mysterious Vascones in the north is unaccounted for but

we do know they were still in northern Spain when the

Romans arrived and may be antecedents of the

Basques and their anomalous language. In Almería the

Los Millares people, the first Iberians to really exploit

the potential of metal, had a brief but innovative period

in the sun. By around 500 BC the most secure peoples

in Spain were the Iberians, comprising various tribes

along the south and east coast, and the Celts on the

opposite fringe. In between, where their cultures

collided on themeseta, lived the Celtiberians.

15,000BC
He hunts, he gathers, he
paints – Stone Age man
is at home on the Iberian
Peninsula.

1,000BC
Phoenician traders
do business with the
Iberians and found
southern cities.

400BC
The Carthaginians take
control but leave the
natives to develop their
culture.

50
Rome gains a
stranglehold on
Hispania and imposes
its habits on the region.

414
Visigoths, the most
successful marauding
tribesmen, set up shop
in Spain for 300 years.

711
The cultured Moors of
North Africa invade,
beginning an 800-year
tenure in Iberia.

1492
Granada falls and the
remnants of Moorish
power in Spain dissolve.

Key dates

1.2.1 Caves and conquests: from the

Stone Age to theReconquista