Post Series: Spain

Christianity in Spain is often associated with the bloodshed of the Inquisition. While this is a sad reality of the past, it would be a mistake to reduce the influence of the Gospel to that, because the message of the Bible transformed the history of the Iberian Peninsula for good. For this first stage of…

El Camino de Santiago is probably the most popular pilgrimage for Roman Catholic believers. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people walk along the Way to reach Santiago de Compostela. But does the capital of Galicia have anything to tell us about the early phases of Christianity in Spain? In order to answer this question,…

The presence of church buildings in Andalusia may seem normal. After all, Spain is strongly Roman Catholic. And yet, the history of this region reveals that a Christian presence can’t be taken for granted. For the third stage of a miniseries focusing on Spain, we will go to a village near the Mediterranean sea called…

After the Spaniards ended Muslim rule in Andalusia, they didn’t impose a cult of personality with statues of the emperor as conquering empires often do.Why didn’t they do this? And what did they do instead? To discover this, we will visit the city of Guadix in Andalusia. This city is not to be confused with…

A herd of angry wild bulls running after hundreds of men down the narrow streets of an old town in Spain is a familiar scene to many these days. These events, which were rendered famous by the American author Ernest Hemingway, take place each summer in Pamplona. But do they have a connection with the…