40 Interesting Facts About Spain

Here are 40 Interesting Spain facts.

1-5 Spain Facts

1. The 1918 flu pandemic is often called the Spanish flu because Spain didn’t fake and minimize the data about the dead like Germany, Britain, France and the USA. – Source

2. Fascist dictator Francisco Franco brought back the Spanish Monarchy, but the King of Spain instituted a democracy instead as soon as he came into power. – Source

3. Spain is the only country in the world that has a monument to the liver – “The silent and unselfish organ.” – Source

4. Justo Gallego Martínez is a 90-year-old former monk who is building an unauthorized cathedral in Spain since 1961. He works mostly alone for ten hours a day, six days a week. – Source

5. Spain’s Paralympic basketball team were ordered to return their gold medals won in Sydney in 2000 after nearly all of their players were found to have no disability. – Source

6-10 Spain Facts

6. Spain protected and gave thousands of Irish people fleeing British persecution Spanish citizenship. King Philip V issued a decree 1701 stating ” the Irish were to be treated as native Spaniards”. The Spanish also believed the Irish were descendants of an ancient Spanish King. – Source

7. When a 16th-century cathedral in Salamanca, Spain was renovated in the early 1990s, ornate stone carvings of an astronaut and a gargoyle eating ice cream were added near the entrance. – Source

8. In 2012, the entire village of Sodeto in Spain won the lottery, except for one guy. – Source

9. Spain produces more Virgin olive oil than the rest of the world combined yet most of it is sold as Italian virgin olive oil. – Source

10. There is a town in Spain where 700 people are descended from a 17th-century samurai who stayed there after an embassy returned to Japan. They have the surname “Japón”, which was originally “Hasekura de Japón”. – Source

11-15 Spain Facts

11. Snowflake is the only known Albino Gorilla. He was a resident of Barcelona Zoo in Spain. – Source

12. “Gringo” did not originate in Mexico to describe Americans, but in Spain in the 1700’s to describe foreigners whose speech was incomprehensible. Gringo likely came from the word “griego” meaning Greek, which in Spanish was used in the same way as English, “it’s Greek to me” (hablar in griego). – Source

13. In 1492, the Catholic monarchs of Spain issued a decree banning all Jews from Spain. Sultan Bayezid (a Muslim) then sent the Ottoman navy to Spain to rescue the Jews from the Spanish persecution. – Source

14. In 2006 baguettes were simultaneously placed on the ground in both Spain and New Zealand creating the first verified ‘Earth Sandwich’. – Source

15. There is a restaurant in Spain that grills its food over a volcano. – Source

16-20 Spain Facts

16. There are mines in Spain that have been in operation for much of the past 5,000 years, with periods of interruption. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, Spaniards, and modern multinationals have all mined in the same place. – Source

17. There’s a town in Spain that recognizes cats and dogs as equal right citizens. – Source

18. There are only seventeen different ways of rotating and reflecting a pattern such that it completely covers a 2D plane. The Alhambra in Spain contains examples of all seventeen. – Source

19. In Spain, employees get 14 monthly paychecks a year (a double pay in Christmas and summer). – Source

20. For nearly 50 years the Catholic Church of Spain stole nearly 300000 newborn babies from families and sold them to Catholic families for adoption. Telling their bio parents the kids died shortly after childbirth. – Source