The history of the Spanish-speaking world

Spanish is spoken today in more than twenty countries, and its history runs along several lines at once: Iberia and the Americas before they met, the empire that joined them, the revolutions that made new nations, and the century of upheaval and democracy that followed. Each lane follows one region; the story of the language itself runs through all of them.

Eras

  1. Before 1492 (15000 BC–1492)
  2. Empire and the colonial Americas (1492–1808)
  3. Revolutions and new nations (1808–1898)
  4. Revolution, war and dictatorship (1898–1975)
  5. Democracy and today (1975–)

Before 1492 (15000 BC–1492)

  1. between 200 and 1000: Tiwanaku on Lake Titicaca — Near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, at 3,850 metres, stood the highest city of the ancient world.

Empire and the colonial Americas (1492–1808)

  1. 12 October 1492: Columbus reaches America — Christopher Columbus, a sailor most historians agree came from Genoa, persuaded Isabel and Fernando to back a voyage west to Asia; the agreement was signed at…
  2. 7 June 1494: The Treaty of Tordesillas — On 7 June 1494, in the Castilian town of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal agreed to divide the world they were discovering.
  3. 6 September 1522: Elcano sails round the world — Five ships and about 240 men left Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 under the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, paid for by Charles I, to reach…
  4. 1545: Silver is found at Potosí — In 1545 an Indigenous man, Diego Huallpa, is said to have found silver on the Cerro Rico, a red mountain 4,000 metres up in the Andes of today's Bolivia.
  5. August 1550–1551: The Valladolid debate — In 1550 Charles V suspended new conquests and called theologians and jurists to the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid to decide whether Spain's wars in the…
  6. 1565–1815: The Manila galleon — In 1565 Miguel López de Legazpi's expedition from Mexico reached Cebu, and the friar-navigator Andrés de Urdaneta found the way back: north to the latitude of…
  7. 1580–1640: Philip II becomes king of Portugal — When the young King Sebastian of Portugal died in battle in Morocco in 1578 and his old uncle Cardinal Henry in 1580, Philip II, son of a Portuguese princess,…
  8. January 1605: Don Quixote is published — Early in 1605 the Madrid printer Juan de la Cuesta published the first part of Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, a former soldier who had been…
  9. March 1691: Sor Juana answers Sor Filotea — Juana Inés de Asbaje, born at Nepantla near Mexico City in 1648 or 1651, shone at the viceroy's court from 1663 and in 1669 entered the convent of San…
  10. 26 March 1713–1750: The slave asiento goes to Britain — From the sixteenth century the Crown sold the asiento, a monopoly contract to supply enslaved Africans to its American colonies, to Portuguese, Genoese, Dutch…
  11. 1741–2010: The ñ and the shaping of Spanish spelling — The ñ is the letter the world associates with Spanish.
  12. 1767: Charles III expels the Jesuits — In 1767 Charles III ordered the Society of Jesus out of Spain and all its American and Asian dominions, as Portugal and France had already done.

Revolutions and new nations (1808–1898)

  1. 19 March 1812: The Constitution of Cádiz — While French armies held most of Spain, a parliament, the Cortes, met in besieged Cádiz, with deputies from Spain and from the American colonies.
  2. 6 September 1815: Bolívar writes the Jamaica Letter — In 1815 the cause of independence looked lost.
  3. 1847: Andrés Bello's grammar for Americans — In 1847 Andrés Bello published in Santiago his Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos.
  4. 2 February 1848: Mexico loses half its territory: the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — The United States annexed Texas in 1845 and, after a border clash on the Rio Grande, declared war on Mexico in 1846.
  5. 5 May 1862: Cinco de Mayo: the Battle of Puebla — In 1861 Mexico, ruined by the War of the Reform, suspended payment of its foreign debts.
  6. 24 February 1895–1898: José Martí and the Cuban War of Independence — José Martí, born in Havana in 1853 to poor Spanish immigrants, was sentenced to hard labour at sixteen for his writings against Spain, exiled, educated in…
  7. 1898: The Disaster of '98 — Most of Spain's American empire had won independence in the 1810s and 1820s, but Cuba and Puerto Rico remained, along with the Philippines.

Revolution, war and dictatorship (1898–1975)

  1. c. 1922–1926: Mexican muralism is born at San Ildefonso — After the fighting, the education minister José Vasconcelos wanted an art that would teach a largely illiterate country its history on the walls of public…
  2. 16 December 1927–August 1936: The Generation of '27 and Lorca — From 16 to 18 December 1927 a group of young poets travelled from Madrid to Seville, invited by the bullfighter and writer Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, to honour…
  3. 17 July 1936–1 April 1939: The Spanish Civil War — On 17 and 18 July 1936 part of the army, with General Francisco Franco among its leaders, rose against the Republic.
  4. 1951: The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language — In 1951 the president of Mexico, Miguel Alemán, convened the first congress of all the academies of the Spanish language in Mexico City.
  5. 1 January 1959: The Cuban Revolution — In the early hours of 1 January 1959 the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba as the guerrilla army of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement, which had fought…

Democracy and today (1975–)

  1. October 1982: García Márquez wins the Nobel: the Boom — In the 1960s a handful of Latin American novelists became world famous almost at once: the Argentine Julio Cortázar with Rayuela (1963), the Peruvian Mario…
  2. March 1991: The Instituto Cervantes is created — In March 1991 the Spanish government created the Instituto Cervantes, a public institution whose founding law gives it the task of promoting the teaching,…
  3. 2009–2011: One grammar and one spelling for 22 countries — At the end of the 20th century the academies changed their way of working.
  4. c. 2015: The Venezuelan exodus — Venezuela, once the richest country in South America and a magnet for immigrants from Spain, Italy, Portugal and Colombia, has in a decade become the source of…
  5. 28 July 2021–9 December 2024: Peru's bicentennial — Two hundred years after San Martín's proclamation in Lima, Peru named 2021 the 'Year of the Bicentennial of Peru: 200 years of Independence', with 28 July as…
  6. 28 October 2025: Spanish today: almost 635 million speakers — According to the Instituto Cervantes's yearbook El español en el mundo 2025, presented in Madrid on 28 October 2025, almost 635 million people speak Spanish:…

Changes over time