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Spain

Updated: Sep 15, 2022

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Country Name

Spain, officially the Kingdom of Spain.

Location

Spain is located in southwestern Europe. Spain is bordered by the Bay of Biscay, the Balearic Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Alboran Sea; Portugal to the west and France and Andorra to the north. To the south, across the Strait of Gibraltar, the semi-enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are bordered by Morocco.


Capital

Madrid.

Reason for Naming

The origins of the Roman name Hispania, and the modern España, are uncertain, although the Phoenicians and Carthaginians referred to the region as Spania, therefore the most widely accepted etymology is a Semitic-Phoenician one. There have been several accounts and hypotheses of its origin: The Renaissance scholar Antonio de Nebrija proposed that the word Hispania evolved from the Iberian word Hispalis, meaning "city of the western world". Jesús Luis Cunchillos argued that the root of the term span is the Phoenician word spy, meaning "to forge metals". Therefore, i-spn-ya would mean "the land where metals are forged". It may be a derivation of the Phoenician I-Shpania, meaning "island of rabbits", "land of rabbits" or "edge". Hispania may derive from the poetic use of the term Hesperia, reflecting the Greek perception of Italy as a "western land" or "land of the setting sun" (Hesperia, Ἑσπερία in Greek) and Spain, being still further west, as Hesperia ultima. There is the claim that "Hispania" derives from the Basque word Ezpanna meaning "edge" or "border", another reference to the fact that the Iberian Peninsula constitutes the southwest corner of the European continent.






Flag

The first use of the current flag design was on 15 May 1785, while the current Flag of Spain was adopted on October 5, 1981, Spain’s official flag also known as "la Rojigualda".

The flag consists of two red horizontal stripes at the top and bottom and a yellow stripe in the middle which is twice the width of each red stripe.

These Red and yellow colors are known as traditional Spanish colors.

On the yellow stripe of the flag, there is The coat of arms that is a combination of six different coats of arms, representing the six kingdoms that make up Spain, it contains a gold castle set on a red background, a pink-crowned lion set on a white background, vertically red and