Spain owes its unique personality as well as its place in the affairs of the world to the location of the Iberian Penin sula. Together with Portugal, it occupies the extreme southwest extension of the European continent, partially cut off from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees Mountains. A look at the map shows how remote Spain stands from the great centers of European life. It has been protected by distance from the main Indo-European migrations that have given most of Europe its human characteristics.
The Spanish people, their culture and the form of their social and political life derive from the location of their land. The Spanish use a word, querencia, to indicate the spot on which the bull instinct ively stands in the ring to face his destiny. The Iberian Peninsula is the querencia of the Spaniard.
On many early maps Spain appeared as the exact center of the known world, perhaps out of deference to Spanish navigation and national power. On those maps Europe stretched to the north; Span ish America lay westward across the Atlantic, Africa to the south and the older Mediterranean world eastward. At that time Spain, under the Hapsburg kings, dominated the world in all four direc tions. Modern maps show the center of activity elsewhere. But with world attention moving to Africa and Latin America, the geograph ical position of Spain can again be made to appear central. Through out many changes in the fortunes of the various nations of the world, Spain has sometimes played a commanding part, sometimes a quiescent part. Its place, however, between western Europe and northern Africa and its place between the Mediterranean and the Americas, established by the logic of location, have remained constant.
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