What is Iberian Peninsula?

The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe, and includes modern day Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar. It is the western and southernmost of the three southern European peninsulas (the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas). It is bordered on the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea, and on the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean. The Pyrenees form the northeast edge of the peninsula, connecting it to the rest of Europe. In the south, it approaches the northern coast of Africa. It is the second largest peninsula in Europe, with an area of 582 860 km². The name "Iberia" was also used since the times of Ancient Greece and Rome for another territory at the opposite corner of Europe, Caucasian Iberia, in modern day Georgia.

History

The Iberian Peninsula has been inhabited for at least 1,000,000 years and the artifacts found at Atapuerca are dated at 350,000 years old.

The original peoples of the Iberian peninsula (in the sense that they are not known to have come from elsewhere), consisting of a number of separate tribes, are given the generic name of Iberians. This may have included the Basques, the only pre-Celtic people in Iberia surviving to the present day as a separate ethnic group.

The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean coast and founded trading colonies there over a period of several centuries.

Around 1100 BCE Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cádiz) near Tartessos. In the 8th century BCE the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Empúries), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the East, leaving the south coast to the Phoenicians. The Greeks are responsible for the name Iberia, after the river Iber (Ebro). In the 6th century BCE the Carthaginians arrived in Iberia while struggling with the Greeks for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (Latin name of modern day Cartagena).

In 219 BCE, the first Roman troops invaded the Iberian Peninsula, during the Second Punic war against the Carthaginians, and annexed it under Augustus after two centuries of war with the Celtic and Iberian tribes and the Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian colonies becoming the province of Hispania. It was divided in Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior during the late Roman Republic; and, during the Roman Empire, Hispania Taraconensis in the northeast, Hispania Baetica in the south and Lusitania in the southwest.

Hispania supplied the Roman Empire with food, olive oil, wine and metal. The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius I, the philosopher Seneca and the poets Martial and Lucan were born from families living in Iberia.

In the early 5th century, Germanic tribes invaded the peninsula, namely the Suevi, the Vandals (Silingi and Hasdingi) and their allies, the Sarmatian Alans. Only the kingdom of the Suevi (Quadi and Marcomanni) would endure after the arrival of another wave of Germanic invaders, the Visigoths, who conquered all of the Iberian peninsula and expelled or partially integrated the Vandals and the Alans. The Visigoths eventually conquered the Suevi kingdom and its capital city Bracara (modern day Braga) in 584-585.

In 711 CE, a Moorish Umayyad army of approximately 2,000 Arabs and 10,000 Berbers from North Africa invaded Visigothic Christian Hispania. Under their leader Tariq ibn-Ziyad, they landed at Gibraltar and brought most of the Iberian Peninsula under Islamic rule in an eight-year campaign. Al-ʾAndalūs (Arabic الإندلس : Land of the Vandals) is the Arabic name given the Iberian Peninsula by its Muslim conquerors and it's subsesquent inhabitants. By the 11th century, the majority of its subjects, Christians and Jews, had become Islamized and Arabized.

From the 8th to the 15th centuries, parts of the Iberian peninsula were ruled by the Moors (mainly Berber with some Arab) who had crossed over from North Africa. Many of the ousted Gothic nobles took refuge in the unconquered north Asturian highlands. From there they aimed to reconquer their lands from the Moors: this war of reconquest is known as the Reconquista. Christian and Muslim kingdoms fought and allied among themselves. The Muslim taifa kings competed in patronage of the arts, the Way of Saint James attracted pilgrims from all Western Europe and the Jewish population of Iberia set the basis of Sephardic culture.

In medieval times the peninsula housed many small states including Castile, Aragon, Navarre, León and Portugal. The peninsula was part of the Islamic Almohad empire until they were finally uprooted. The last major Muslim stronghold was Granada which was eliminated by a combined Castilian and Aragonese force in 1492. The small states gradually amalgamated over time, with the excepion of Portugal, even if for a brief period (1580-1640) the whole peninsula was united politically under the Iberian Union. After that point the modern position was reached and the peninsula now consists of the countries of Spain and Portugal (excluding their islands - the Portuguese Azores and Madeira Islands and the Spanish Canary Islands and Balearic Islands; and the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla), Andorra, French Cerdagne and Gibraltar.

Countries & territories

Political divisions of the Iberian Peninsula sorted by area:

• Spain, occupying most of the peninsula, including the centre, east and northwest.
• Portugal, occupying most of the west of the peninsula
• Andorra, a microstate at the northern edge of the peninsula in the Pyrenees between Spain and France
• French Cerdagne, a tiny French territory in the Pyrenees Mountains technically on the Iberian peninsula
• Gibraltar, a small British overseas territory near the southernmost tip of the peninsula, bordering with Spain

See also

• Iberian languages
• Prehistoric Iberia
• Hispania
• Mainland Portugal
• Gibraltar
• Nationalities in Spain
• Sephardi Jews
• Spanish people
• Portuguese people
• Forests of the Iberian Peninsula
• Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula

External links

• IberianatureA guide to the environment, geography, climate, wildlife, natural history and landscape of Iberia
• Detailed map of the Pre-Roman Peoples of Iberia (around 200 BC)
• Spanish words of Latin origin Spanish , a romance language.