The Spanish culture of festivals and remembrance was deeply conditioned by the hazardous political history of the 19th century, culminating in what was called the “Disaster of 1898”. This crisis-ridden historical frame meant that the question what should be remembered and celebrated as the historical foundations of the Spanish nation became deeply controversial.

Even so, a Spanish national culture crystallized around a repertoire of narratives, myths and heroes, derived from national history writing. Some historical episodes from classical antiquity, particularly the siege of Numantia and Viriato’s resistance against the Roman Empire, were held up as examples of the primeval Spaniards’ indomitable love of liberty; but the central reference period for Spanish Romantic Nationalism was medieval and early modern.

For the liberal elites, the Middle Ages revealed Spaniards’ secular love for freedom, epitomized by the medieval parliaments (Cortes) and the coexistence of Christianity, Jewry and Islam. This was extended into the early modern period. The Comuneros revolt against Charles V (1520-22) or the execution of the Justicia de Aragón (1591) represented, in this view, how a tradition of freedom and municipal democracy was undermined by the Habsburgs’ despotism. Against this view, Conservative-Catholic interpretations of the national past highlighted the anti-Islamic Reconquista, the Habsburg Empire, and the conquest of the Americas as examples of Spain’s divinely-ordained mission as guardian of Catholicism.

In addition to these older topics, Romantic liberals constructed a new site of memory around the Peninsular War, renamed and reconfigured as the War of Independence. Its heroes and actions, both national and local, were glorified as a proud expression of the Spanish national character. This historical repertoire nourished the commemorative culture of the long 19th century.

The Spanish liberal state pursued a nationalization agenda, not only of people’s attitudes but also of public spaces. Streets and squares in every city and village, heretofore mainly rooted in popular culture, were rebranded with the ideals, historical events, and heroes of Spanish nationalism. Terms such as “Constitution”, “Independence”, “Spain”, “Reyes Católicos”, “Cervantes” or “Bailén” (site of an 1808 battle) displaced much of the former urban nomenclature. Fresh street-naming opportunities emerged late in the century with urban growth and new districts.

Particularly, the figures of the national past began to occupy the urban space of the capital, Madrid, which aspired to become a monumental synthesis of Spanish liberal nationalism. Madrid was filled with statues and monuments that broke with commemorative culture of the ancien régime. One of the first modern commemorative statues was the “Monument to the Heroes of 2 May Uprising against the French occupation” (planned 1821, inaugurated 1840). In 1831, a monument was inaugurated to Daoiz and Velarde, both heroes of 1808.

At the same time, the nation’s cultural heritage began to be monumentalized in Madrid with a statue devoted to Cervantes (1835), facing the Congress. Statues to painters and writers followed: like Murillo (Sevilla, 1864; Madrid, 1871), Calderón de la Barca (Madrid, 1878), Velázquez (Madrid, 1899), Goya (Madrid, 1902), Quevedo (Madrid, 1902) and Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1902). At the same time, Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote became prominent as symbols of Spanishness and of the Hispanic world, also in Latin America. This process culminated in the commemorations of 1916 and the erection of a new monument to Cervantes (Madrid, 1916-25).

Spanish monumental culture was to bloom in the last decades of the 19th century, when a monument fever spread throughout the country. During that time, many more monuments were erected to commemorate the historical figures of Queen Isabella “la Católica” (Madrid, 1883), Columbus (Barcelona, 1888; Madrid, 1892), or both of them (Granada, 1892). All of them monumentally glorified the Spanish Golden Age.

As part of its national historicism, the liberal state began to commemorate itself. A programme of public statuary served to elevate the new, middle-class heroes to national heroes: politicians, intellectuals, and the military. The monuments to leading 19th-century political figures, like Espartero (Madrid, 1886), Prim (Barcelona, 1887), Cánovas (Madrid, 1901), Argüelles (Madrid, 1902), Martínez Campos (Madrid, 1907) or Castelar (Madrid, 1908), were part of this new celebratory programme. Commemorating and celebrating the monarchy (“Royalty Nationalism”) played a crucial role. A statute devoted to Queen Isabel II was erected in 1850 and a monument to Alfonso XII (projected in 1901) was inaugurated in 1922, both in Madrid. These monuments were not uncontroversial. In some cases (e.g. statues to Ferdinand VII) they were even exposed to iconoclastic anger. On the other hand, the loss of the overseas colonies was comforted by a imperial nostalgia that, in the public space, was exemplified by statue (Madrid, 1902) to Eloy Gonzalo, hero of the battle of Cascorro, or the 1915 monument to the heroes of the battle of Caney (both battles took place in Cuba).

Spanish commemorative culture also had resounding failures. The state failed in its ambition to create a monumental cemetery similar to the Parisian Père Lachaise. The Panteón de Hombres Ilustres in Madrid, an ambitious project promoted by progressive liberals in 1837, proved to be controversial. Achieved in 1869, it quickly passed into oblivion.

In addition to the efforts of the central authorities, a considerable number of monuments and commemorations were promoted by provincial and local governments. This was a way to claim the importance of the home region in forging the Spanish national past. The monuments to Hernán Cortés (Medellín, 1890), Viriato (Zamora, 1903), El Justicia de Aragón (Zaragoza, 1904), el Gran Capitán (Córdoba, 1923), Sebastián Elcano (Getaria, 1924), Pizarro (Trujillo, 1929), El Cid (Sevilla, 1929) or the statues of the medieval King James I “the Conqueror” in Valencia (1891), Castellón (1896) and Palma de Mallorca (1927), were manifestations of regional patriotism in the shaping of Spanish national culture. So was the commemoration of King James I in Barcelona and the celebration of the First Conference of History of the Aragonese Crown (1908).

Romantic Nationalism also expressed itself in conservation efforts. A Provincial Commissions of Artistic and Historic Monuments was instituted in 1844, but suffered from lack of funding. The restoration of historic sites was strongly influenced by the codes and practices of architectural historicism, by the controversies between Restorationism and Conservationism, and by the popularization of regional styles from 1890. One significant example was the restoration of The Alhambra in Granada, a representative site of Al-Andalus legacy popularized by Washington Irving but damaged by French troops (1812) and an earthquake (1821); Alhambrism was, indeed, widely popular throughout Europe as an orientalist icon of Spanish exotic couleur locale. In Barcelona, there was the ambitious urban reform of the “Barrio gótico”, led by Josep Puig i Cadafalch; his “Catalan medieval architecture”, included an imaginative reconstruction of the cathedral’s façade (1887-1912) in neo-gothic taste.

Commemorations and national festivals played an important role in celebrating and shaping the national past. The first attempt to establish a national day was in 1814, intended to celebrate the uprising of the people of Madrid against Napoleonic troops on 2 May 1808. Despite its nationwide ambitions, the 2nd of May was perceived as an overly local event, and failed to gain acceptance as a national feast day. In the century’s closing decades, a succession of national commemorations occurred: Calderón de la Barca (1881), Murillo (1882), Santa Teresa (1882), Recadero’s Conversion to Christianity (1889), Velázquez (1899), El Greco (1914) and Cervantes (1916). In 1908 a dual centenary was celebrated: of the War of Independence (particularly in Zaragoza, where a Franco-Spanish International Exhibition was held), and of Constitution of Cádiz (1910, San Fernando; 1912, Cádiz). The success of all these efforts was equivocal.

By far the most successful commemoration was the 12th of October. 12th October 1492 was conceptualized as a foundational date in the shaping of a Spanish nation by invoking Columbus’s discovery of America and the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Kings. The Discovery was firstly commemorated by the Conservative Party in 1892, declaring 12th October Día de la Hispanidad, and was subsequently associated with the Virgen del Pilar, patron of Spanishess, consolidating the Catholic-religious overtones of the Spanish national day. The 12th of October then became transnational in scope, encompassing all Hispanic peoples of both sides of the Atlantic Ocean under the concept of Spanishess. The climax of Hispanic exaltation took place in 1929, when an International Exhibition and an Ibero-American Exhibition were held in Barcelona and Seville, respectively.  

This complex repertoire of images of the past nourished Spanish commemorative culture. Nevertheless, the public sphere was an arena subjected to continuous negotiation and competition. Spanish commemorative culture had to face the agendas fostered by the Internationalist movement and by emerging Basque and Catalan nationalism, all of them with their own commemorative programmes. Last but not least, it worked under the shadow of the Catholic Church with its own public ceremonies and monumental projects, e.g. the spread of public monuments in the devotional campaign to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, from 1919 onwards.