“Spaniards are those who cannot be anything else,” is the famous phrase of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. From when the Constitution that would be that of 1876 was being prepared. A group of its drafters, young deputies, wanted to gain the sympathy of Cánovas, President of the Government and initial promoter of the entire Bourbon Restoration, between 1876 and 1923, a coup d’état by General Miguel Primo de Rivera.
I quote that sentence regarding the debate we recently had at the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, discussing (speaker Juan Díez Nicolás) the way to self-identify those who are citizens of a country. In the Constitution of 1812, the drafters of our first Law of Laws were clearer and gave the geographical definition of article 1: “The Spanish Nation is the meeting of all Spaniards from both hemispheres.”
My thesis in the aforementioned controversy was that of two different origins. The first is that of the inhabitants of most of the Iberian Peninsula except Portugal and the entities of the Crown of Aragon (the kingdom of that name, the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands and Catalonia). That is, what are kingdoms, then regions, now autonomous communities, originating in Covadonga, which emerged with the sword of Pelayo and the phrase “Asturias is Spain and the rest is a land of conquest.”
The other fundamental origin to consider itself Spanish in Hispania, in another way, was the Hispanic March that the emperor Charlemagne conquered. Therefore, many of the inhabitants of that group consider themselves Carolinians and not from Pelayo.
This division of Spaniards into two origins cannot be considered a legend of roads, nor an outdated history. Best regards to all Spaniards, whether you are from Pelayo or Carolinos.