Portal:Spain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Kingdom of Spain is an European country located at the southwest of the continent. It shares the Iberian peninsula with Portugal which is located at the west. At the north, it borders France while at the south it borders the Straits of Gibraltar which separates it from Morocco. Spain is both a Mediterranean and an Atlantic country.
The language spoken in Spain is Spanish. In some other regions, Catalan, Basque, Galician and others are spoken as well. The population of Spain is 42,717,064 (January 2003 est.) The capital city is Madrid.
Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, Spain in 1547. Little is known of Cervantes' childhood; what's certain is that his family was not well off: his father was continually on the move looking for work. His father was Rodrigo de Cervantes, a surgeon — in those days an ill-paid profession of low repute which eventually led him to debtor's prison. His mother, Leonor de Cortinas, may have been a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity.
Records indicate that when he was 21 years old (1568) Cervantes was a student at the Estudio de la Villa de Madrid, a pre-graduate liberal arts school. Juan López de Hoyos, Cervantes' teacher at the "Estudio de la Villa," referred to him as "our dear and beloved pupil," a common form of address in those days. In 1569 he left Madrid for Rome, the reasons for which are unclear. According to some sources a warrant was issued for the arrest of one Miguel de Cervantes for having dueled and wounded the master builder Antonio de Sigura. Around this time Cervantes wrote elegaic verses, which he dedicated to Queen Isabel de Valois.
- October 19, 2005: The Madrid chief prosecutor's office has issued arrest warrants for three American soldiers, accused of the murder of Jose Couso, a Spanish television cameraman, in Iraq, in April, 2003. [1]
- October 17, 2005: Authorities of both Morocco and Spain are under pressure from human right groups invistigating the recent incidents in both Melilla and Ceuta's borders. Many illegal immigrants were killed. [2]
- September 29, 2005: 5 Sub-Saharan illegal immigrants were killed while trying to jump the fences separating the border between Morocco and Spain, in both Ceuta and Melilla. [3]
- August 25, 2005: Spain is still under fire. Forest fires is pushing the alert at maximum in Galicia. [4]
- August 25, 2005: The National Statistics Institute (INE) announces that Producer prices rose 0.5 per cent in July, 2005. It also grew 4.6 per cent from 2004. [5]
- August 24, 2005: The number of Moroccan immigrants in Spain is still on the rise. [6]
- Improve Pedro Almodóvar, the current Cinema Collaboration of the week.
- The immediate task is to create the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spain.
edit Useful sites on Spain
