Spanish Empire

The Spanish Empire traces its founding to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas on 12 October 1492 and endured, in steadily diminishing form, until Spain's withdrawal from Spanish Sahara in 1976. Governed for most of its history from Madrid, after an earlier itinerant royal court, the empire at its greatest extent in the late 1700s and early 1800s covered about 13.7 million square kilometers across the Americas, Africa, parts of Asia and Oceania, and territories in Europe, becoming known as the empire on which the sun never sets. It was founded under the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, grew further under the Habsburg emperor Charles V and his son Philip II, and later passed to the Bourbon dynasty beginning with Philip V in 1700. Most of Spanish America won independence in a wave of wars between 1808 and 1826, and Spain lost most of its remaining major overseas possessions, including Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, in the 1898 Spanish-American War; the empire's final vestige, Spanish Sahara, was ceded in 1976, during the reign of Juan Carlos I.