From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spain, officially the Kingdom of Spain (Spanish: España, Reino de España), is a country located in Southern Europe, with two small exclaves in North Africa (both bordering Morocco). The mainland of Spain is bounded on the south and east by Mediterranean Sea (containing the Balearic Islands), on the north by the Bay of Biscay and on the west by the Atlantic Ocean (containing the Canary Islands off the African coast). Spain shares land borders with Portugal, France, Andorra, Gibraltar, and Morocco. It is the largest of three sovereign states that make up the Iberian Peninsula — the others being Portugal and Andorra.
Different cultures have settled in the area of modern Spain, such as the Celts, Iberians, Romans, Visigoths, and Moors. For just over five centuries, during the Middle Ages, large areas were under the control of Islamic rulers, a fragment of which survived as late as 1492, when the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragón completed the 770 years long process of driving the Moors out. That same year, Christopher Columbus reached the New World, leading to the creation of the world-wide Spanish Empire. Spain became the most powerful country in Europe, but continued wars and other problems gradually reduced Spain to a diminished status. The 20th century was dominated in the middle years by the Franco dictatorship; with the dawn of a stable democracy in 1978, and having joined what is now known as the European Union in 1986, Spain has enjoyed an economic and cultural renaissance.
There are a number of hypotheses as to the origin of the Roman name “Hispania”, the root of the Spanish name España and the English name Spain. Spain is a democracy which is organized as a parliamentary monarchy. It is a developed country with the ninth-largest economy in the world.
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At 194,884 mi² (504,782 km²), Spain is the world’s 51st-largest country. It is comparable in size to Turkmenistan, and is somewhat larger than the U.S. state of California.
On the west, Spain borders Portugal, on the south, it borders Gibraltar (a British overseas territory) and Morocco, through its cities in North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla). On the northeast, along the Pyrenees mountain range, it borders France and the tiny principality of Andorra. Spain also includes the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean and a number of uninhabited islands on the Mediterranean side of the strait of Gibraltar, known as Plazas de soberanía, such as the Chafarine islands, the isle of Alborán, the “rocks” (peñones) of Vélez and Alhucemas, and the tiny Isla Perejil. In the northeast along the Pyrenees, a small exclave town called Llívia in Catalonia is surrounded by French territory.
Mainland Spain is dominated by high plateaus and mountain ranges, such as the Sierra Nevada. Running from these heights are several major rivers such as the Tajo, the Ebro, the Duero, the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir. Alluvial plains are found along the coast, the largest of which is that of the Guadalquivir in Andalusia.
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According to the World Bank, Spain’s economy is the eighth biggest worldwide and the fifth largest in Europe. As of 2005, the absolute GDP was valued at $1.12 trillion, just behind Italy and ahead of Canada. It is listed 22nd in GDP per capita, just behind the United Arab Emirates and ahead of Singapore.
Spain’s mixed economy supports a GDP that on a per capita basis is 90% of that of the four leading West European economies and slightly below the European Union average. The centre-right government of former prime minister Aznar worked successfully to gain admission to the first group of countries launching the euro in 1999. Unemployment stood at 7.6% in October 2006, a rate that compares favorably to many other European countries, and which is a marked improvement over rates that exceeded 20% in the early 1990s. Perennial weak points of Spain’s economy include high inflation, a large underground economy, low productivity and one of the lowest rates of investment in research and development among developed countries, also an education system slated in OECD reports as one of the worst in Western Europe. Due to the loss of competitiveness, manufacturing jobs are being lost to cheaper workforce countries in Eastern Europe and Asia.
On the brighter side, the Spanish economy is credited for having avoided the virtual zero growth rate of some of its largest partners in the EU. In fact, the country’s economy has created more than half of all the new jobs in the European Union over the five years ending 2005. The Spanish economy has thus been regarded lately as one of the most dynamic within the EU, attracting significant amounts of foreign investment. During the last four decades the Spanish tourism industry has grown to become the second biggest in the world worth approximately 40,000 million Euros in 2006[43] More recently, the Spanish economy has benefitted greatly from the global real estate boom, with construction representing 16% of GDP and 12% of employment.[44] According to calculations by the German newspaper Die Welt, Spain is on pace to overtake countries like Germany in per capita income by 2011. However, the downside of this has been a corresponding rise in the levels of personal debt; as prospective homeowners struggle to meet asking prices, so the average level of household debt has tripled in less than a decade. Among lower income groups, the median ratio of indebtedness to income was 125% in 2005.
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Spain’s population density, at 87.8/km² (220/sq. mile), is lower than that of most Western European countries and its distribution along the country is very unequal. With the exception of the region surrounding the capital, Madrid, the most populated areas lie around the coast.
The population of Spain doubled during the twentieth century, due to the spectacular demographic boom by the 60’s and early 70’s. The pattern of growth was extremely uneven due to large-scale internal migration from the rural interior to the industrial cities during the 60’s and 70’s. No fewer than eleven of Spain’s fifty provinces saw an absolute decline in population over the century. Then, after the birth rate plunged in the 80’s and Spain’s population became stalled, a new population increase started based initially in the return of many Spanish who emigrated to other European countries during the 70’s and, more recently, it has been boosted by the large figures of foreign immigrants, mostly from Latin America (38.75%), Eastern Europe (16.33%), North Africa (14.99%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (4.08%).[46] In 2005, Spain instituted a 3-month amnesty program through which certain hitherto undocumented aliens were granted legal residency. Also some important pockets of population coming from other countries in the European Union are found (20.77% of the foreign residents), specially along the Mediterranean costas and Balearic islands, where many choose to live their retirement or even telework. These are mostly English, French, German, and Dutch from fellow EU countries and, from outside the EU, Norwegian.
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