In Spain, as in other parts of Europe, there was a growing interest in oral literature at the end of the 18th century. In his Teatro histórico-crítico de la elocuencia española (“Historical and critical theatre of Spanish eloquence”, 1786), Antonio de Capmany stressed the relevance of Spanish popular poetry throughout history. Afterwards, between 1799 and 1803, Juan Antonio Iza de Zamácola published his Colección de las mejores coplas de seguidillas, tiranas y polos que se han compuesto para cantar a la guitarra (“Collection of the best seguidillas, tiranas and polos composed to be sung with the guitar”). In the introduction, he vindicated the value and the national dimension of this kind of popular poetry. In the following decades, interest in this oral literature increased under the influence of German Romanticism. In his Silva de romances viejos (“Silva of old ballads”, 1815), Jacob Grimm highlighted the relevance of this oral tradition in Spain, and announced a compilation project that was never carried out.

During the first half of the 19th century, the Romantic bibliophiles, philologists and scholars showed some interest in oral balladry, but without attempts at systematic collection. Generally, they held that oral ballads were the dispersed remnants of medieval originals expressing the authentic Spanish national character. Accordingly, they directed their energies at editing these medieval ballads, which they tried to locate in archives and libraries. This Romantic perspective guided the huge collection of Spanish ballads carried out by Agustín Durán, as well as the Primavera y flor de romances (“Spring and flowering of ballads”, Berlin 1856) by Ferdinand Wolf and Konrad A. Hofmann, the first great compilation of Spanish ballads to ignore modern material.

From the 1820s scholars like Bartolomé José Gallardo had noted down oral ballads. Washington Irving pointed out the richness of the oral ballads recited by the Andalusian mule drivers, which he encountered first-hand during his 1829 visit to Spain. In the 1830s, José Zorrilla stated that his popular legends and traditions were directly inspired by the tales that he had heard from the Spanish people. For his part, at the end of that decade, Serafín Estébanez Calderón gathered four oral ballads which he then published in his well-known Andalusian costumbrist scenes afterwards. Agustín Durán, José Amador de los Ríos and Antonio de Trueba y Cossío also copied and published samples of oral literature. Like Almeida Garrett or Estácio da Veiga in Portugal, they saw these oral ballads as archeological remains – the pristine features of which had been ruined. Therefore, they felt that they had to restore these ballads.

In 1822, Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero), who knew the work of Jacob Grimm through her father, Jan Nikolas Böhl von Faber, used the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812-22) as a model to start a compilation of Andalusian folk tales. Drawing on Herder, Cecilia Böhl stated that the Spanish national character could be found in these tales, as far as they had preserved the Spanish spirit of medieval times. However, she, like her father, read German Romanticism in a very traditionalist way, linking a Spanish Volksgeist to antiliberal and doctrinal Catholicism and its political outreach. For this reason, she “restored” or even “remade” popular tales and proverbs with an ideological bias. They were included in her novels and tales, and also published in independent collections such as Cuentos y poesías populares andaluces (“Andalusian folk tales and poetry”, 1856) or Cuentos, oraciones, adivinas y refranes populares e infantiles (“Children’s and popular tales, sentences, riddles and proverbs”, 1877). She maintained, like her father, a close relationship with Ferdinand Wolf, who was a pivotal figure in the spread of German Romanticism (and the work of the Grimm brothers in particular) in Spain.

From the mid-19th century on, some oral ballad collections began to be published in Catalonia (Manuel Milà i Fontanals) and Asturias (José Amador de los Ríos); other areas of the Iberian peninsula (like Castille, Galicia or even Andalusia) were neglected until the end of the century. From the beginning, the various scholars who worked from the different peninsular provinces collaborated closely in an undertaking that, at that moment, they considered national and common, but they acknowledged singularities in the diverse Spanish literary traditions. In other fields of study, Emilio Lafuente Alcántara (1825–1868) published his prominent Cancionero popular (“Popular songbook”, 1865), a milestone in the study of the Spanish popular songs; and Pedro Felipe Monlau gathered important collections of Castillian proverbs.

At the end of the century, interest in oral literature was encouraged all around Europe by the folklore movement. In Spain, the “new science” was inspired by the work of Antonio Machado y Álvarez, also known as Demófilo, member of the Folk-Lore Society of London. Spanish folklorists maintained a close relationship with this institution. They saw their works as part of a larger comparatist enterprise with a Spanish, European and universal dimension. Machado y Álvarez was a disciple of the Spanish Krausists, who in Romantic terms saw popular literature as the authentic expression of the Spanish national spirit. His folklorist project also had a “regenerative” purpose: it would lay the foundation for the recovery of Spain through the exploration of its roots, in all their regional and cultural diversity, and the establishing of a common goal that would overcome internal disputes. Spanish folklorists accordingly organized themselves into a federative-regional structure. In 1881, Demófilo inspired the establishment of El Folk-lore Andaluz, the first of these regional federations. In the following years other folkloric societies were constituted in Galicia, Extremadura and Castille. Machado y Álvarez planned, but failed, to found a more general and national umbrella organization. Spanish folklorists widened the scope of observation, renewed methodologically the study of popular literature and traditions, and introduced new positivist and Darwinist trends. Among their more important works were the various collections of “flamenco songs” by Machado y Álvarez and the Cantos populares españoles (“Spanish popular songs”, 1882) by Francisco Rodríguez Marín.

In the last decades of the century, a new Romance philology took root in Spain and outlined the necessity of a systematic study of Spanish oral ballads, as well as a greater accuracy in collecting and publishing them. In 1900, Marcelino Menédez Pelayo published his Apéndices y suplemento to Wolf/Hofmann’s Primavera y flor de romances, this time including ballads from the modern oral tradition. In the following years ballad collections boomed, consolidating the new philological attitudes. Ramón Menéndez Pidal and María Goyri, with the collaboration of several scholars and institutions, started an enormous compilation project that lasted into the second half of the 20th century. This project was in accordance with the Spanish regeneracionismo, which saw in the historical continuity of the Spanish ballads, and in their diffusion all around the Iberian peninsula and in Spanish America, the possibility of reviving a Castilian-Spanish nation at the core of a Pan-Hispanic civilization.