At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Empire was the first truly global empire — the first on which, the phrase went, the sun never set. From the Americas to the Philippines, from Africa to the Pacific, Spain controlled territories that together dwarfed anything that had come before. The legacy of that empire — in language, architecture, religion, food, and culture — is still everywhere.
This is not an uncritical account of empire. The Spanish colonisation of the Americas involved the destruction of great civilisations, the death of tens of millions of indigenous people through violence and disease, and the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade at a scale that shaped the modern world. These facts are inseparable from the history.
What follows is an account of that history's reach and its enduring traces — the cities it built, the cultures it created and destroyed, and the complex, often painful relationship that the 20 countries that share Spanish as their official language have with their colonial past.
The Americas - 1492 and After
Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean in 1492 opened a process of conquest and colonisation that, within fifty years, had given Spain control of territories from the tip of Patagonia to the northern Rio Grande — an area larger than the Roman Empire at its peak.
The two great civilisations destroyed in this process were the Aztec Empire, conquered by Hernán Cortés between 1519 and 1521, and the Inca Empire, conquered by Francisco Pizarro between 1532 and 1572. Both Cortés and Pizarro were from Extremadura in western Spain — a region that contributed disproportionately to the conquest, driven by a combination of poverty, ambition, and the culture of military adventurism that had characterised the Reconquista.
The conquistadors brought horses, firearms, and — crucially — diseases. Smallpox, measles, and typhus, to which indigenous populations had no immunity, killed an estimated 50–90% of the pre-Columbian population within a century of European arrival. This demographic collapse was the single most consequential event in the history of the Americas.
What Spain Built
Out of conquest and devastation, Spain built cities. The model of colonial city planning — the grid layout centred on a Plaza Mayor with a cathedral, a government building, and a market — was applied across the continent with remarkable consistency. Mexico City was built directly on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, using the stones of its temples. Lima, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Cartagena de Indias, Quito, and Santiago were built to the same template.
Many of these cities' historic centres are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The colonial architecture of Cartagena de Indias — the walled port city on Colombia's Caribbean coast — is one of the most beautiful preserved examples of Spanish colonial urban design anywhere. Quito's historic centre, Oaxaca's streets, and the churches of Puebla are similarly extraordinary.
Spain built over 1,000 churches in Mexico alone within a century of conquest. The stone came from demolished Aztec temples. The labour came from the people who had built them.
The Legacy of Spanish Language
Spanish is today the official language of 20 countries and the mother tongue of approximately 490 million people — making it the second most spoken language in the world by native speakers, after Mandarin. It is the fastest-growing major language in the United States, where Spanish speakers number over 40 million.
The linguistic unity of the Spanish-speaking world is remarkable given its geographic spread. A Mexican can communicate readily with an Argentine; a Colombian can understand a Spaniard (with adjustment for accent and some vocabulary). The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), founded in Madrid in 1713, remains a coordinating institution for the Spanish language across all its variants.
But the colonial linguistic legacy is also complicated. The imposition of Spanish suppressed and in many cases destroyed indigenous languages. Of the hundreds of languages spoken in the Americas before 1492, many are now extinct. Others — Nahuatl (Aztec), Quechua (Incan), Maya, Guaraní — survive, often in tension with Spanish as communities negotiate identity and belonging.
Religion and the Church
The Catholic Church was inseparable from the Spanish colonial project — the conquest was explicitly justified as a religious mission, the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity. The result is that Latin America today is the world's most Catholic region, with over 425 million Catholics — about 40% of the global Catholic population.
The syncretic religious traditions that emerged from the meeting of Catholicism with indigenous spiritual practices are among the most vivid cultural expressions in Latin America. Día de los Muertos in Mexico, Candomblé in Brazil, the varied forms of folk Catholicism across the continent — these are the products of that complex, often violent encounter.
The Philippines
Spain's Asian colony is often overlooked in histories of the empire but represents one of its most enduring legacies. Spain controlled the Philippines from 1565 to 1898 — over three centuries — during which it imposed Catholicism (the Philippines remains the only predominantly Catholic country in Asia), Spanish-derived administrative structures, and an urban architecture visible in the surviving Intramuros district of Manila.
The Spanish legacy in the Philippines includes thousands of Spanish-origin surnames (required by decree in 1849 for census purposes), a cuisine that absorbed Spanish techniques and ingredients, and approximately 4,000 Spanish-origin words still in common Filipino use.
The Complicated Reckoning
In 2019, Mexico's president wrote to the Spanish government and the Vatican requesting a formal apology for the conquest. Spain declined. This exchange encapsulates the unresolved political and emotional charge of the colonial legacy — still capable, five centuries later, of producing diplomatic friction.
In Latin America and the Philippines, attitudes toward Spain and toward colonial history are complex, generational, and contested. For many, the shared language, cultural heritage, and historical connection are genuine sources of identity and even affection. For others, the colonial past remains a framework for understanding present inequalities — in land distribution, in racial hierarchy, in the devaluation of indigenous culture.
The Spanish Empire's legacy is vast, visible, and unfinished. The cities it built are living cities. The language it spread connects half a billion people. The wounds it inflicted have not fully healed. Understanding the Hispanic world today requires holding all of this together.