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The Iberian Peninsula
A high, dry tableland walled off by the Pyrenees
The Pyrenees do the work of a wall. They seal the Iberian Peninsula off from the rest of Europe so thoroughly that the old quip about Africa beginning at the mountains carries a grain of geography in it: cut off to the north, separated from Morocco by only 14 kilometers of water at Gibraltar, Iberia has always faced two ways at once. The peninsula covers 583,000 square kilometers between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and holds Spain, Portugal, Andorra and British-run Gibraltar, some 59 million people in all. Its interior is not the sun-drenched coast of the travel posters but a high, dry, wind-raked tableland, and that plateau has shaped everything down to the placement of Madrid.
The Meseta Central, a plateau averaging 600 to 700 meters, occupies the heart of the peninsula, ringed and crossed by mountains: the Cantabrians in the north, the Sistema Central, the Sierra Morena, and the Sierra Nevada in the south, where Mulhacen reaches 3,479 meters, the highest ground on the peninsula. Five great rivers — the Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, Guadalquivir and Ebro — cut their way to the sea, four of them running west to the Atlantic. Climate splits the land in two: green, rainy Galicia and the Basque coast in the north, semi-arid Mediterranean scrub through the center and south, and around Almeria something close to true desert.
Iberia has always been a receiving room. Phoenicians and Greeks traded on its coasts, Rome made it Hispania, Visigoths ruled it, and Muslim armies crossed from Africa in 711 and stayed for centuries, leaving al-Andalus, its irrigation, its scholarship, and the Alhambra. The Christian reconquest, completed in 1492, launched the same monarchs across the Atlantic, and Spanish and Portuguese ships carried two languages to half the world. Today the peninsula is an agricultural powerhouse and a tourism giant at once, growing much of Europe's winter produce under plastic in Almeria while receiving well over 100 million visitors a year. Drought, water disputes and a depopulating rural interior are its sharpest domestic arguments.