Spain

Perhaps no other European country is so vivid and beautiful as Spain. Iberians have the blood like the wine, they love the music, the dancing and the women. Here men are fighting bulls, create immortal works or frustrate the entire continent with their non-traditional theories, while their ladies achieve immortality through the art that they inspire. Spain is a tourist paradise, offering more to the price of a single civilization and requiring weeks, if not months, to be discovered as it should.

The Kingdom of Spain, under its official name, is a European country, situated in the south-west of Europe in the Iberian peninsula. Spain has a surface of 505 990 square kilometers (the fifties largest country in the world) and is divided in 19 Autonomy communities (17 on land and 2 islands). Spain had a population of 46 million in 2008, and has the capital in Madrid who has 6.1 million inhabitants in the metropolitan area. Other major cities of Spain are Barcelona (4.8 million inhabitants), Valencia (1.5 million inhabitants), Seville (1.2 million inhabitants) and Bilbao (1 million inhabitants).

The Spain’s national day is on the 12 October – the Hispanic day – when Cristopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492. The official language of Spain is Spanish, who is the second most spoken language in the world, but there are several regional languages spoken like the Catalan, the Basque or the Galician.

Spain is a hereditary constitutional monarchy and the most important religion is the Roman Catholicism while Islam is the second largest religion. The official currency of Spain is the euro.

You can get to Spain by plane, in one of many airports in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Sevilla or Valencia who also have a distinctive architecture, by bus or by car using one of the six highways, by train using the speed trains that link the biggest cities, or by boat from UK or North Africa.

Spain is one of the most important cultural centers in Europe with the second number of UNESCO Heritage Sites in the world, has the largest area of coastline in Europe and three mountain ranges with spectacular sites: the Sierra Nevada, the Central Cordillera and the northern Pyrenees.

The most important tourist attraction in Spain are: the Balearic islands with some of the most popular resorts in the world, the Andalucia and Castile regions known by the abundance of castles, monasteries, churches and museums like the Moorish palace of Alhambra, the Torre del Oro cathedral with the Columbus’s sarcophagus, the Cervantes House, the Prado Museum and the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid, the El Greco museum in Toledo. Other attractions are the cities of Barcelona with the Sagrada Familia cathedral, the No Camp stadium, the Picasso Museum or the Magic Fountain, the Santiago de Compostella, one of the most important pilgrimage centers in Europe, and Salamanca (the old cathedral, the Plaza Mayor), Valladolid (old churches) and Zaragoza (Roman ruins, the Moorish Sovereign palace and cathedrals).