🇪🇸
Spain
Let's explore one of the world's most fascinating countries — packed with surprises, stories, and pen pal potential.
The Basics
3 Things That Will Blow Your Mind
Genuinely. You'll want to tell someone immediately.
The world's biggest tomato fight happens in a small Spanish town
Every August in the town of Buñol, around 40,000 people throw roughly 150,000 kilograms of tomatoes at each other for exactly one hour. It is called La Tomatina and nobody is entirely sure how it started. The streets run red and the whole town smells of tomato soup for days afterwards.
Gaudí's famous church in Barcelona has been under construction for over 140 years
Antoni Gaudí began designing the Sagrada Família in 1883 and it is still being built today. It has been under construction for longer than most countries have existed in their current form and is only now approaching completion, more than 100 years after Gaudí died.
Spain introduced chocolate to the rest of the world
When Spanish explorers arrived in the Americas in the 1500s, they encountered the cacao drink that the Aztecs had been making for centuries. They brought it back to Spain and added sugar to the bitter liquid and Europeans went wild for it. Every chocolate bar in the world traces its existence back to that moment.
Famous For
Food
Paella, tapas, churros dipped in thick hot chocolate, jamón that has been cured for years in a mountain village. Spanish food is intensely regional and people from Valencia will tell you at length that everyone else is making paella incorrectly.
Flamenco
Flamenco was born in Andalusia in the south of Spain from a mix of Romani, Moorish, and Spanish musical traditions going back hundreds of years. The dancing, singing, and guitar playing are all part of the same art form and it is still performed live across Spain every night.
Football
Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are two of the most famous clubs in the world and the matches between them are watched by hundreds of millions of people. Spain has also won the World Cup and multiple European Championships.
History and Architecture
The Alhambra palace in Granada was built by Moorish rulers over 700 years ago and is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Gaudí's surreal, organic buildings in Barcelona look like nothing else on Earth and were designed by a man who refused to use straight lines.
Did You Know?
In Spain, children stay up much later than in most other countries because the whole country runs on a later schedule. Dinner at 9 or 10pm on a school night is normal and many shops close in the afternoon for a few hours and reopen in the evening. Spain is actually on the wrong time zone for its geography and should by the sun's position be on the same time as the UK, but it changed its clocks to match Germany in 1940 and never changed back.
Pen Pal Connection
A child in Spain might write to you about a local fiesta that took over their entire street for three days, a dinner that started at 10pm because that is simply when dinner happens in Spain, the great ongoing argument about which region makes the best food, their football team, or why the enormous church in Barcelona has been under construction for their entire life and their parents' lives and their grandparents' lives and is still not finished.