Spain Richest in Europe

In the early eighth century, the Visigothic Kingdom was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, ushering in over 700 years of Muslim rule. Islamic Spain became a major economic and intellectual center, with the city of Cordoba being among the largest and richest in Europe. Several Christian kingdoms emerged in the northern periphery of Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragon,

Portugal, and Navarre. Over the next seven centuries, an intermittent southward expansion of these kingdoms—metahistorically framed as a reconquest, or Reconquista—culminated with the Christian seizure of the last Muslim polity, the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, in 1492. That same year, Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs, whose dynastic union of Castile and Aragon is sometimes considered the emergent Spain as a unified country. From the

16th until the early 19th century, Spain ruled one of the largest empires in history, which was among the first global empires; its immense cultural and linguistic legacy includes over 570 million Hispanophones,[17] making Spanish the world’s second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese. Spain hosts the world’s third-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.