The impact of Romanticism on architecture involved two related new attitudes: first, that classicism, until then the exclusive stylistic register, had to be complemented with all the styles and masterpieces of every age and every nation; second, that each nation could find the inspiration for its artistic flowering in the past and its expressions of the national character. As a consequence, 19th-century architecture became national, and marked by eclecticism and historicism.

In Spain the main practitioners of this Europe-wide revolution were José Amador de los Ríos, Aníbal Álvarez and Antonio de Zabaleta. A process of professionalization, centralization and institutionalization started in the 1840s, when the Escuela especial de Arquitectura (1844) replaced the older Real Academia de San Fernando and outlined a new programme merging arts and sciences (strongly inspired by the Parisian École des Beaux Arts). A modern journal appeared in 1846: the Boletin Español de Arquitectura echoed the European polemics between Academicism and Gothicism and the fondness for archeology of the French Annales archéologiques. It contained translated articles and engravings and provided the leading Spanish architects with a forum and showcase. A recurrent request was pointed out during the 1840s: a history of Spanish architecture was needed, for national reasons, and because the ecclesiastical confiscations enacted by the Liberal government caused neglect and spoliations in various places. Spanish architects were pained by the more advanced position of foreign scholars, who, for all their achievements, often held false notions concerning Spain. José Caveda published the first attempt at a Spanish “state of the art” in 1848: Ensayo histórico sobre los diversos géneros de arquitectura empleados en España desde la dominación romana hasta nuestros días.

In a sudden move forward, Comisiones de Monumentos Históricos y Artísticos (1844) – again inspired by a French model, the Comité historique des arts et monuments (1840) – were encouraged in every province. The aim was to inventorize all major Spanish monuments and to order them into a national artistic canon. With the same aim, the professors of the Escuela especial de Arquitectura organized field trips (expediciones artísticas). The first of these was when Antonio de Zabaleta guided his students to Toledo (1850), followed by other Castilian cities close to Madrid in the following years (Segovia, Salamanca); such was its success that the state offered annual subsidies to enable a luxury publication of the excursions’ findings: the Monumentos Arquitectónicos de España (1859-82).

For foreign scholars the salient aspect of Spain was its Islamic architecture. In the imaginaire of 19th-century orientalism, Spain was frequently described as the “antechamber” of that exotic world, with Granada’s Alhambra Palace as the iconic eye-catcher. Alhambrism infected the European continent usually in the forms of leisure architecture: most large cities had at least one Alhambra theatre, cabaret or dance hall. In addition, Owen Jones, a British architect who was looking for a modern style of decoration distinct from neoclassicism and the Gothic revival, was inspired by the walls of the Alhambra, which he visited in 1832. He applied his theories in the interior painting of the Crystal Palace (built for the Great Exhibition of London, 1851) and in his seminal design book The grammar of ornament (1856), which revolutionized decoration, ornament and polychromy.

Within Spain, Neo-Moorish architecture was a complex national issue. Liberal historians like Amador de los Ríos and Manuel de Assas declared in the 1840s that Mudéjar – the works done by Muslims under Christian rule during the Iberian Middle Ages – was the most suitable “national style” along with the other candidates – Visigothic, Plateresque or the Asturian pre-Romanesque.  It was a hybrid but unitarian style for a hybrid but unitarian nation, as well as a Christianization of the problematic Muslim past; as such it was also a political (Liberal) declaration of the importance of tolerance as well as a way to reconcile the modern Spanish nation with its exotic roots. Amador de los Ríos championed the style in his lectures and writing, and ensured that the new Museo Arqueológico Nacional (1871) reserved a room for the “Arte Hispano-mahometano y estilo mudejar” (placed under his personal supervision).

The Mudéjar style, also embraced by religious Conservatives as a subjection of Moorish traditions to a Christian framework, was mainly used, here as in the rest of Europe, for leisure-oriented designs. Alongside exceptions like the City Hall of Jaén (1899) and Madrid’s San Matías and La Paloma churches (1877 and 1912), it was applied in train stations (Huelva-Término, 1880; Toledo, 1920), spas (Lanjarón, 1920), hotels (Vichy Catalán, Caldas de Malavella, 1898) and theatres (Falla, Cádiz, 1910). But Neo-Mudéjar was supreme in designs for bull-rings. A tradition linking the fiesta nacional with the Moors led to the preference of a Moorish style over the Roman model (used previously in the outstanding Plaza of Valencia, 1859). The trend started with the Plaza de toros of Toledo (1866), La antigua in Madrid (1874), Monumental (Barcelona, 1914) and Las Ventas (Madrid, 1929). The idea was even exported to the Portuguese Campo pequeno (Lisbon, 1890).

The other favourite national style was Plateresque, an eclectic late Gothic/early Renaissance style with hints of Mudéjar and Lombard components. Though less original than Mudéjar, it had the advantage of fitting the narrative of the nation’s national heyday from Spanish Unification under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs, the conquest of Granada and Columbus’s voyage to the imperial rule of Charles V and Philip II. In addition it was associated with European places of learning like Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares with their ancient university buildings. Neo-Plateresque was used later than Neo-Mudéjar; its finest examples – all public commissions – are the City Hall and the Cavalry Academy of Valladolid (1908, 1924), the Diputación of Palencia (1914), the Palace of Communications (Madrid, 1919) and the Collège d’Espagne at the Cité Internationale de Paris (1935).

The choice between Neo-Plateresque and Neo-Mudéjar proved a dilemma for the Spanish architectural presence at the international exhibitions so prominent in the 19th century. Following the international political agenda of Napoleon III, participant countries were asked from 1867 to build a national pavilion according to their génie national. Displayed together in a defined area of the exhibitions like the  “Rue des Nations” (Paris, 1878), the achievements of every nation’s quest for a national architecture were compared, ranked and rated. This periodic struggle of competitive self-representation provoked animated domestic debates about the nation’s image as projected abroad. Spain chose Neo-Plateresque – the more serious, European variant – on two occasions where a respectable image of the nation was required: Paris 1867, and at the first international exhibition after the 1898 trauma of the colonial losses (Paris 1900). Foreign reactions were mixed. The pavilion of 1867 met with a cold response which, together with the success of an Alhambra-inspired, Prussian-owned Maurischer Kiosk, triggered three consecutive Neo-Moorish representations (1873, 1876, 1878). The Neo-Plateresque choice for the Parisian 1900 exhibition was widely celebrated, however.

Neo-Gothic emerged in the Bourbon Restoration of 1874 with its official nationalism as propounded by Cánovas del Castillo (historian, president and strongman of the new regime), profiting also from its popularity in Ultramontanism across Europe. Public commissions included the Almudena Cathedral (Madrid, 1883-1993), the Pantheon of Illustrious Men (Madrid, 1891-1889) and the Basílica de Covadonga, hallowing the cradle of the reconquista in the Asturian mountains (1877-1901). All these were partially inspired by different versions of northern Italian Gothic.

In Catalonia, Neo-Gothicism had established itself as a national style. The Middle Ages had been canonized as a point of reference for the Catalan Renaixença; in 1878 the architect Lluís Domènech I Montaner published a seminal article unambiguously titled “En busca d’una arquitectura nacional”; that search led him to mix Catalan Gothic with Múdejar hints, achieving its height in Barcelona fin-de-siècle modernisme: works like Domènech’s own Hospital de Saint Pau (1901-30) and Palau de la Música Catalana (1908), and the buildings of Antonio Gaudí, which, however, soon moved into a very idiosyncratic direction – from the Sagrada Família (started in 1882/1883) to Park Güell (1914), Casa Batlló (1906) and Casa Milà (1910).

Besides historicism, regionalism provided an important connection between architecture and nationalism. The 1910 lectures of Vicente Lampérez at the Ateneo de Madrid followed a European trend seeking the essence of the nation not only in its history but also in its localities with their various particularities. This turn from historicism to vernacularism and from unity to variety manifested itself in the northern estilo Montañes and the southern estilo Sevillano, led, respectively, by Leonardo Rucabado and Aníbal González. By the mid-1910s regionalism had become widely popular. The Crown sanctioned the movement through the works of the Marquis de la Vega-Inclán, head of the Comisaria Regia de Turismo y Cultura Popular (1911-28); it was stipulated in 1915 that regionalism was the appropriate style for public commissions like the local post offices (Málaga 1916/1926, Santander 1926); it was even favoured for the provincial offices of the American Compañia Telefónica Nacional de España (from 1924).

The swansong is marked by the two Spanish exhibitions of 1929. The times were changing: at the International Exhibition of Barcelona the starkly modernist German pavilion of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was placed together with the Pueblo Español, a huge architectural synthesis of the nation with 117 reproductions of real monuments harmonized in an ideal Spanish town. At the Ibero-American Exhibition of Seville, regionalism was everywhere. Another architectural synthesis of the nation, Aníbal González’s overwhelmingly impressive Plaza de España, marked the end of historicism in Spain.