Spain

Spain is a country in southwestern Europe and is the current residence of Emily Elizabeth Howard.
==History:==
While Spain was first settled by modern humans 42,000 years ago, it first came to historical relevance as a region that was contested between the Roman and Carthaginian empires, the former of which eventually drove the Carthaginians out and established Spain as a province of the Roman Empire. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, large portions of the Iberian peninsula were variously occupied by Germanic tribes and Muslim empires until eventually the Christian kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Navarra, Portugal, and Aragon drove back the Muslims in a period known as the "Reconquista."
Of these kingdoms, Castile eventually came to dominate and united the disparate kingdoms into a single kingdom of Spain, Portugal however remaining an independent country. In the same century that Spain was centralized, Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer, was sponsored by the Spanish queen Isabella I of Castile to find a new route to India. In the process, the explorer discovered the Americas, and thus began a process of colonization of the new world that eventually made Spain one of the largest empires in its day. Various rebellions, independence movements, and political instability led to the decline of Spain as a world power in the 19th and 20th centuries, but its legacy is still carried on through the hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers across the globe and through its rich cultural heritage.
Category: Locations