Cultural life

Antoni Gaudí was the most famous Spanish architect as well as one of the most unusual architects of the early 20th century. Through an eclectic approach, he created a unique style reminiscent of the Mudéjar, an architectural style blending Muslim and Christian design. Despite Gaudí’s posthumous prominence, during his life he had no influence outside of Spain and little influence within it. Most of Gaudí’s work was done in Barcelona. His most famous building is the unfinished Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family. Spain’s leading architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—some of whom attained international renown—included Josep Lluís Sert, Eduardo Torroja, Sanz de Oiza, Ricardo Bofill, José Rafael Moneo, and Santiago Calatrava.

Cinema

Spain’s film industry has always been small and economically fragile. A large number of the films shown in Spanish cinemas in the 21st century were imported, from other European countries and, above all, from the United States.

The Spanish film director Luis Buñuel is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Because he was in exile during the Franco regime, most of his films were made outside of Spain, first in Mexico and then in France.

The cinema suffered greatly from the censorship of the Franco regime, and it began to recover only at the end of the 1950s with the work of Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga. After 1970 a number of Spanish directors, such as Carlos Saura, Pilar Miró, Victor Erice, and Pedro Almodóvar, achieved critical success both in Spain and abroad. José Luis Garcí’s Begin the Beguine (1982) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, as did Fernando Trueba’s Belle Epoque (1992). However, Spanish films were not generally economically successful abroad, the one major exception being Almodóvar’s comedies, especially Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), and All About My Mother (1999), the last of which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film. By the late 1990s a new generation of directors, benefiting from government tax incentives and increased exposure on the international film festival circuit, had begun to attract attention outside Spain. In the first years of the 21st century, intellectually ambitious ghost stories such as Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) emerged as a genre that easily found audiences outside the country. Amenábar’s The Sea Inside (2004) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Museums

Foremost among Spain’s many art museums is the Prado Museum in Madrid, which began construction at the end of the 18th century and was completed in the early 19th century. Many of its paintings came from royal collections of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Prado also has an annex housing 19th- and early 20th-century art.

Other outstanding museums in Madrid include the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, the Joaquín Sorolla Museum, and the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum. The Queen Sofía Museum, which opened in the early 1980s and is dedicated to modern and contemporary art, houses Picasso’s famous mural Guernica, named for the Basque town bombed in 1937 by the fascists. Important museums outside the capital include the Picasso Museum and the Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona, the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid, the El Greco Museum in Toledo, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca.

There are a large number of special-interest museums. Some of them are national institutions, such as the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid and the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, but many more are provincial or local institutions. There are also numerous museums attached to cathedrals and other religious institutions.

Libraries and archives

Spain has some 6,500 public and private libraries. Some important ones, such as the libraries of the palatial royal monastery of El Escorial near Madrid and of the University of Salamanca, date back more than four centuries. Others are more recent, notably the National Library in Madrid, which was created in the 19th century.

Spain has a vast number of public and private archives of various sorts: local, provincial, regional, and national. The most important are the National Historical Archive in Madrid, the General Archive of the Administration in Alcalá de Henares, the Archive of the Civil War in Salamanca, the General Archives of Simancas (established in 1540), and the Royal Archives of Aragon in Barcelona. Perhaps the most important for people outside Spain is Sevilla’s Archives of the Indies, which hold an immense quantity of documentation about Spain’s former empire in the Americas.

Academies and institutes

Spain’s oldest and most famous academy is the Royal Spanish Academy. Founded in 1713 under Philip V, the first Bourbon king, it was modeled on the French Academy in Paris. Its most important task is to “cultivate and set standards for the purity and elegance of the Castilian language”; since 1951 it has done this in cooperation with similar scholarly institutions in Latin American countries to promote the lexicographical corpus of Spanish in the world. As part of this work, it publishes a massive dictionary intended to be the definitive work of its kind for the language.

There are a number of other cultural and intellectual academies and institutes, most of which date from the 18th and the 19th centuries. These include the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Royal Academy of History, and the Royal National Academy of Medicine. The most prestigious institution for research is the Council for Scientific Research (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; CSIC), an autonomous public research organization based in Madrid and affiliated with the government Ministry of Education and Science. It was created in 1940 by the Franco regime to promote and manage research. Today there are branches of the CSIC throughout Spain, with the largest number of research centers being located in Madrid.

In its attempt to put itself at the center of the international Spanish-language cultural world, Spain awards the Cervantes Prize, comparable to the Nobel Prize for Literature for all authors writing in Spanish. Among the recipients have been many of the leading Latin American writers. An agency for international cooperation maintains economic and cultural ties with the countries of Latin America and other countries with cultural links to Spain.

One of the most interesting cultural initiatives was the creation in 1991 of the Cervantes Institute. This government agency, modeled on the British Council and the German Goethe Institute, is responsible for promoting the study of Spanish language and culture abroad. In the early 21st century, the Cervantes Institute operated in more than 60 cities in some 30 countries throughout the world.