A Country Without a Founding Day

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.