Insider’s View: the Reconquista, the Empire and Spain’s enemies

On 8 September, José María Figaredo, a Vox MP, travelled to Covadonga, a small town in Asturias that occupies a huge place in the Spanish national imagination. Here, according to a tradition established many centuries after the events took place, around 722 a Christian leader named Pelayo is said to have defeated a Muslim force. A battle of probably modest proportions has, over time, come to be seen as the opening act of the Reconquista – the eight centuries that would lead to the fall of the peninsula’s last Muslim kingdom, Granada, in 1492. Figaredo had not, however, gone to Covadonga to talk about the Middle Ages. He was there for Asturias Day and was speaking about Spain in 2026. Standing before the sanctuary, he called for a return to the “spirit of Don Pelayo”, a “spirit of strength and conquest”, and above all the “spirit of the Reconquista”. He then moved seamlessly from the 8th to the 21st century. In Ceuta, he said, an “invasion” is underway: migrants have become “invaders”, whilst the government focuses on their rights and forgets those of Spaniards. To emerge from the crisis, we must return “to our roots”, to our principles and to “what once made us great”. That rhetoric resurfaced immediately after the announcement of the general election scheduled for 29 November. In the hours following Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s announcement, Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, singled out Ceuta as one of the issues on which the party would campaign: Spain, he said, would go to the polls with Ceuta “invaded”. The Middle Ages did not feature explicitly in the statement, but the vocabulary was the same.

It would not be the first time, after all, that such rhetoric has featured in an election campaign. As early as 2018, Vox celebrated Covadonga as one of the battles through which Spain and Europe would be liberated from the ‘Islamic invasion’. In April 2019, it chose that very location to launch its general election campaign. Abascal laid a floral offering at the Virgin’s feet, whilst the invocation “save us and save Spain” rang out; behind him stood the statue of Pelayo, erected in 1965, at the height of the Franco regime. In messages shared on social media, the “cradle of the Reconquista” became the “cradle of Spain”.

Pelayo and Covadonga take centre stage in a great national epic spanning more than a millennium. On one side are those who founded, defended, unified and made Spain powerful; on the other, the enemies who, time and again, have invaded it, slandered it or sought to divide it. The protagonists and the centuries may change, but the narrative remains surprisingly consistent. It is a literary genre particularly dear to the new nationalist right, who love to seek confirmation of their political convictions in the past, preferably without being too disturbed by the complexities of history. In the case of Vox, it all begins with a Spain that did not yet exist. Wars, alliances and conflicts between Christian and Muslim kingdoms are thus transformed into a nation’s long struggle to reclaim its territory. The victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 becomes one of the milestones in this centuries-long endeavour, which culminated in 1492 with the conquest of Granada by Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. Men who lived centuries apart end up fighting for the same nation, as if they had shared its destiny from the very beginning. Also in 1492, Columbus reached the Americas. The end of the Muslim political presence on the peninsula and the beginning of overseas expansion become, in Vox’s neo-nationalist narrative, two consecutive moments in the same history. Alongside the medieval heroes are those of the Empire. Isabella the Catholic, Charles V and Philip II, but also Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, occupy a privileged place in Vox’s historical pantheon. Abascal once grouped them together under a single label: ‘All those who cannot be named: Don Pelayo, the Catholic Monarchs, Pizarro and Hernán Cortés’. These are heroes whom the party wishes to restore to the nation, wresting them from a dominant culture accused of having banished them.

Under Charles V and Philip II, Spanish history reached the height of its glory. The Habsburg monarchy ruled over territories scattered across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and was one of the continent’s leading powers. In Vox’s account, that complex, composite monarchy becomes the embodiment of a dual mission: to expand Spanish power and to defend Catholicism. In 1571, the Holy League’s victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto can thus be placed on the same axis as the Reconquista: the Muslim enemy is no longer on the peninsula, but in the Mediterranean. Jorge Buxadé, one of Vox’s leading figures, has distilled this lineage into four names: “Covadonga, Las Navas, Lepanto, Trent”. Two medieval battles against Muslim powers, a naval battle against the Ottomans and the council that defined the Catholic response to the Protestant challenge become milestones in a single narrative: a Catholic Spain that fights, resists and triumphs over its enemies.

However, greatness also has its downside: the poor reputation that accompanied the expansion of the Spanish monarchy. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, whilst the Habsburg armies fought on European battlefields, another war was being waged through books, pamphlets and images denouncing the fanaticism of the Inquisition, recounting the atrocities committed by the conquistadors in the Americas and portraying Spain as the land of intolerance and despotism. This portrayal was destined to endure through the centuries, eventually coming to be known as the ‘Leyenda Negra’. The subject has returned in recent years to the forefront of public debate in Spain. The most striking example was the success of María Elvira Roca Barea’s Imperiofobia y leyenda negra, published in 2016 and which became a bestseller. The book has popularised the idea that Spain’s poor historical reputation is the product of a campaign fuelled by rival powers and internalised by the Spanish themselves. Vox has found a valuable argument in this interpretation: Spain was not only great, it was also the victim of a centuries-long smear campaign. It matters little that many of its enemies’ accusations were based on actual events.

Spain’s ancient enemies have now taken on a new guise. The English, the Dutch and the Protestants are a thing of the past, but the Leyenda Negra lives on, according to Vox, through those who perpetuate its prejudices today. The threat now lurks within the nation itself: on the left, in Catalan and Basque nationalism, and in certain sections of the cultural and academic worlds, which are accused of having adopted a hostile interpretation of Spanish history. In the lexicon of this cultural battle, terms such as ‘Hispanophobia’ and, at times, the old label of ‘Anti-Spain’ recur.

During the 2019 election campaign, a number of historians, when interviewed by El País, pointed out that in the 8th century Spain did not yet exist and that the wars between Christian and Muslim kingdoms had not been fought to liberate a nation that would not come into being for many centuries. Vox responded by accusing the newspaper and the scholars of “spitting on Spain” and of showing “very little love for our nation”. A historiographical controversy over the Reconquista was thus transformed into a matter of national loyalty.

There is, however, one period in Spanish history on which Vox seems less keen to impose a shared narrative: the 20th century. The Republic, the Civil War and the Franco regime occupy far less space in its discourse than the Reconquista and the Empire. Its leaders have maintained that the party has no position on the Civil War or the Franco regime, and that everyone should be free to interpret the past as they see fit. In 2018, Vox stated that no parliament can dictate how history should be interpreted. This is a rather surprising profession of interpretative pluralism for a party that accuses historians of lacking patriotism when they question its account of the Reconquista. It echoes, at least on the surface, the so-called ‘pact of oblivion’ that accompanied the democratic transition following Franco’s death, when the main political forces sought to remove the recent past from political confrontation in order to foster national reconciliation. Of that spirit of compromise, however, Vox seems keen to retain only what suits it: the opportunity to challenge the policies of democratic memory in the name of freedom of interpretation, denouncing them as an attempt to impose an official interpretation of the Civil War and the dictatorship. Pelayo, on the other hand, is politically more manageable than Franco. He belongs to a distant past that lends itself to the construction of a founding myth, whilst the dictatorship still permeates family memories, victims, mass graves and public controversies. Moreover, Franco, unlike the heroes of the Reconquista, certainly did not fight a war against Islam. On the contrary, he cultivated privileged relations with various Arab countries, surrounded himself with a Moroccan bodyguard and deployed North African troops during the civil war. Not exactly the sort of precedents that lend themselves to celebrating Christian Spain’s centuries-long resistance to the Muslim invader. Vox thus ends up reviving a narrative of Spanish history that Francoism itself had helped to enshrine – Pelayo, the Catholic Monarchs, imperial grandeur – whilst preferring to leave the figure of the dictator in the background.

It is above all in the celebration of the Empire that this national memory extends beyond the borders of the Iberian Peninsula. The conquest of the Americas becomes one of the defining moments of ‘Hispanidad’ – the community of language, religion and culture that links Spain to the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas. In Vox’s narrative, the arrival of the Spaniards brings with it Christianity, the language and cultural intermingling, and gives rise to a shared civilisation. In Mexico, however, the heroes of the Spanish conquest do not necessarily occupy the same place in the national narrative. In March 2019, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wrote to Felipe VI asking Spain to acknowledge the abuses committed during the conquest and to offer an apology. This sparked a diplomatic row with Madrid. Whilst López Obrador called for recognition of the suffering of indigenous peoples, Vox proposed celebrating the conquerors: in 2020, it tabled a motion in Parliament to mark the 500th anniversary of the conquest of Mexico and to promote the figure of Cortés in schools. The following year, on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlán, the party celebrated the victory of Cortés and his indigenous allies, arguing that Spain had ‘liberated millions of people’ from Aztec rule. In October 2021, standing before the statue of Cortés in Medellín, his hometown, Vox MP Victor Sánchez del Real celebrated the “solid foundations of Hispanidad” bequeathed by the conquistadors and accused those who criticised their actions of still fuelling the Leyenda Negra.

The request for an apology made by López Obrador in 2019 had, meanwhile, sparked a controversy destined to linger well beyond the end of his presidential term. Madrid had not acceded to that request, which continued to weigh on relations between the two countries, to the extent that in 2024 Claudia Sheinbaum, who succeeded López Obrador as President of Mexico, excluded Felipe VI from her inauguration ceremony. It was not until last March that the monarch, whilst visiting an exhibition in Madrid dedicated to indigenous Mexican women, finally acknowledged, in his generosity, that during colonisation there had been “many abuses” and incidents of which one can certainly not be proud. Sheinbaum welcomed those words as a gesture of rapprochement, which she would later describe as “a very important step”.

On 25 June, Felipe VI returned to Mexico and met Sheinbaum at the National Palace. The rapprochement between the two countries was also facilitated by the monarch’s belated acknowledgement of a reality that historians have been documenting for decades. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, clergymen, lawyers and officials of the Spanish monarchy itself were questioning the legitimacy of the conquest and denouncing the excesses of the conquistadors. To find some of the harshest criticisms of Spain’s expansion in the Americas, one need not, therefore, turn to its present-day detractors: one need only read what the Spaniards themselves wrote five centuries ago.

Five centuries on, Cortés continues to divide Spanish politics in this way. For Vox, accustomed to distinguishing the nation’s heroes from their detractors, the division of roles was relatively straightforward as long as it was historians, intellectuals or left-wing figures who were challenging the glorified version of the conquest. Now that even the King of Spain is beginning to distance himself somewhat from that narrative, it is becoming a little more difficult to determine which side the enemies of the fatherland are on.