When did Spain become independent?
Wow, this is really hard to answer. First of all, Spain did not really have an “independence day”, in the same way that the US had. We (I’m from Spain) were not colonized by a foreign power, and then had to fight a liberation war. That did not happen at any point in our history. Now, precisely for that lack of “birth date”, historians have tried to point a moment where Spain became Spain. Traditionally, that moment has been seen in 1492, when the Catholic Kings expelled Jews and Arabs from the conjoined realms of Aragon and Castile. That is hugely problematic, though. For a number of reasons: 1.- The marriage of Isabel (Queen of Castile) and Fernando (King of Aragon) did not mean the unification of laws. The territories belonging to the former Kingdom of Aragon kept their parliaments, their laws, their currencies, and their cultures up to the beginning of the 18th century, when the new monarchic dinasty of the Borbons raised to the throne (Juan Carlos I, the current Spanish king, is a
