Spain

Discover Spain

Fun Foods

Paella, Tapas, Patatas Bravas, Croquetas, Churros

In most of the world, a fairy collects the baby teeth kids leave under their pillow. In Spain, it's a mouse.

He's called Ratoncito Pérez, and he scurries through the city's pipes at night to swap your tooth for a coin or a small gift. You can even visit his tiny front door in Madrid.

Spain's real history goes back thousands of years, and one stretch shaped almost everything that came after. For nearly 800 years, Muslim rulers from North Africa called Moors governed large parts of Spain.

They built stunning palaces and brought advances in science and medicine. But Christian kingdoms in the north spent centuries slowly pushing south in a campaign called the Reconquista, which means "reconquest."

It all came to a head in 1492. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella defeated the last Moorish king in Granada, forced Jewish people to leave the country, and sent Christopher Columbus west across the ocean, all in the same year.

The wealth Columbus brought back made Spain the most powerful empire in the world during the 1500s. Conquistadors, Spanish soldiers and explorers, seized huge stretches of Central and South America and shipped gold and silver home.

But that empire came at a terrible cost. Native peoples across the Americas were enslaved, killed, and wiped out by diseases the Europeans brought with them.

Spain's power faded over the centuries. The 20th century brought the worst of it: a civil war from 1936 to 1939 killed hundreds of thousands of people and left a dictator named Francisco Franco in charge.

Franco ruled for 36 years. He silenced his opponents and banned regional languages like Catalan and Basque. When he died in 1975, Spain rebuilt itself into a democracy within a few years.

In Madrid, knock on Ratoncito Pérez's little door. Then head to Barcelona, where the Sagrada Família church has been under construction since 1882 and still isn't finished.

In Granada, the Alhambra is a palace complex built by Moorish kings in the 1200s and 1300s, covered in intricate tilework and surrounded by gardens you can walk through.

For food, tapas are small plates meant to be shared around the table. Order churros con chocolate, fried dough sticks dipped in thick hot chocolate that Spaniards eat for breakfast. And try paella, a rice dish cooked with seafood or chicken that comes from the Valencia region.