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Short History Of Spain and Culture
Travel tips for your trip to Spain Hotel Maps Famous Places in Spain helps you to make your trip to Spain in the holiday a Splendid One
Cave-dwellers of France and Spain: from 30,000 years ago
The area to the north and south of the Pyrenees, in modern France and Spain, is occupied from about 30,000 years ago by palaeolithic hunter-gatherers who make good use of the many caves in the area. They leave astonishing signs of their presence, and of their sophistication, in the paintings with which they decorate the walls.
There are many surviving examples, of which the best known are Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. But almost twice as old are the paintings recently discovered in the Chauvet Cave in France.
Neolithic villages: from the 5th millennium BC
In the regions bordering the Atlantic coast, the transition from palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to neolithic villagers begins in about 4500 BC. These villagers later develop a striking tradition of prehistoric architecture.
In most of Europe neolithic communities live in villages of timber houses, often with a communal longhouse. But along the entire Atlantic coast, from Spain through France to the British Isles and Denmark, the central feature of each village is a great tomb, around which simple huts are clustered. The tomb chambers of these regions introduce the tradition of stonework which includes Passage graves and megaliths.
The massive neolithic architecture of western Europe begins, in the late 5th millennium BC, with passage graves. The name reflects the design. A stone passage leads into the centre of a great mound of turf, where a tomb chamber - first of wood but later of stone - contains the dead of the surrounding community.
One of the best-known examples in Spain is the walled settlement of Los Millares. Dating from about 2000 BC, the village has a nearby cemetery of about 100 beehive tombs. The dome of each is constructed on the corbel principle, pioneered on the Atlantic coast some two millennia earlier on the Île Longue, in Brittany.
Prime Minister Zapatero came to power in 2004 in the wake of the Madrid terrorist attacks. His Socialist Party was re-elected in March 2008. Presiding over a period of ongoing economic growth, Zapatero withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq and instituted social reforms including legalisation of same-sex marriage, modernisation of divorce laws, and raising of the minimum wage.
Infrastructural improvements such as the proliferation of the high-speed train network have also been a feature of his premiership, which has been strongly pro-European, in contrast with that of his pro-USA predecessor.
