Spain has 50 properties included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Forty-six of them are monumental sites and another four are natural treasures. The prestigious medievalist Eduardo Manzano, one of the greatest experts on Al Andalus, has managed to weave a splendid journey through the history of the peninsula through its 46 architectural jewels recognized by Unesco.

Throughout its 390 pages, dotted with formidable images, the historian reveals a multifaceted, multiform and diverse Spain, far from the monochrome vision to which the founding myths of the nation have tried (and still try) to reduce our past. In fact, Monumental Spain follows in the footsteps of his previous enlightening book Diverse Spain published in 2024 with the determined intention of dynamiting the foundations of the exclusionary Spain that today returns with unusual force on the back of reactionary thinking.

On the other end of the phone, Manzano unpacks his arguments with precision and restraint. “History is not a fossil,” he reasons. It is a succession of pages that intertwine with each other and that compose day by day a future that is not written anywhere.

Question: What pushed you to write Monumental Spain?

Answer: The idea was to try to show that the history of Spain can be seen from many perspectives and one of them was precisely that of these UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There are 46 of them and these cultural sites have two very important characteristics. The first is that they cover practically all historical periods from Atapuerca, the first hominids documented in the peninsula, to the contemporary period with the works of Gaudí or modernism in Barcelona.

The idea was that these places should not only be seen from the point of view of art history, but also as historical processes. And it also has the advantage that these places are in all the autonomous communities. The goal was to make this tour very visual and to give an idea of the enormous diversity in the history of this country, with its mosques, synagogues, palaces and all kinds of different monumental ensembles.

Let’s say it is a continuation of his previous book España Diversa.

It is a bit, as the English say, a companion. That is to say, this idea that diversity in the history of Spain is a very present thing. It is not something that can only be seen in a multitude of texts and testimonials, but you can actually see it even in the same building. You go to Seville and you see that the Mosque was destroyed to build the Gothic Cathedral, but there are still Islamic elements that are there. And this is something that I believe has not been emphasized enough. This is a living, real, tangible presence, which, however, often tends to be ignored.

What do these 46 World Heritage sites say about our own identity?

I would not speak so much of identity as of the existence of a very great diversity. A diversity where you can see in the same building in Cordoba a Mosque, a Gothic Cathedral and even a chapel dedicated to the Inca Garcilaso. That is, there is even a connection with the history of the colonization of America. This is clear evidence of a historical diversity that has not been sufficiently well known and which I believe we must insist on more and more. There is no closed identity, but rather, due to very varied and sometimes paradoxical circumstances, there is a diversity in the history of Spain.

Does the diverse and monumental Spain question the founding myths of the Spanish nation?

Completely. The founding myths of the Spanish nation always try to give a biased and univocal vision of the past of the Iberian Peninsula or Spain, whatever you want to call it. And it has always implied a homogeneous and unitary story in which there is no room for elements that are foreign. And precisely what we have to do today is to reclaim those elements that are foreign. Even in places like, for example, the Palau de la Música Catalana, which you can see as a jewel of modernism, which it is, but also as the expression of a society that is changing at that time.

The Palau de la Música Catalana would not be understood without this tradition that goes hand in hand with the Catalan nationalist claim and that we should assume as a theme that has been present in the history of this country. We must learn to live with it.

Do we know how to read our historical heritage?

It is a paradoxical question. On the one hand, a lot of research has been done and it is very well studied. But, on the other hand, we are not always able to transmit to the people who visit it the values it contains. The very notion of historical heritage is being increasingly degraded in the sense that it is subject to overcrowding and touristification. And there you are missing a golden opportunity to correctly convey elements of the history of this country’s past. We are moving more towards a culture of selfies, a culture of the beautiful, of what can be attractive to tourists, but we are not taking advantage of the capacity to transmit the knowledge that heritage has. The Alhambra has almost 3 million visitors a year. And the question would be: how much does a person leaving the Alhambra know about the Nasrid dynasty? I think very little, if anything at all. And this is something that should give us pause for thought.

Do we still see Andalus as a foreign parenthesis in the history of Spain?

Of course. This is marked in the traditional account of the history of Spain. It is a parenthesis that is even perceived as a varnish that was completely removed. And the more we get to know this Andalusian past, the more we realize that it is something that is much more present than what has been defended. This is not to deny issues such as the expulsion, which really generated a very large homogeneity, but it would be important to try to understand that this Islamic or Roman presence has left some very significant remains that we can use to build bridges with other communities.

Was Spain born in Covadonga?

You know it wasn’t.

I want to hear it from your own voice.

Of course Spain was not born in Covadonga. Spain is a concept that has varied over time and has had many meanings depending on the time and place. The concept that we have of Spain today has nothing to do with the one that may have existed in the mountains of Covadonga. The interesting thing is that today we think that it is a project that we are still building and that it will ultimately depend on what we decide it will be in the future. That is why I do not agree with these essentialist views that speak of history as a kind of chain to which we are tied. History, on the other hand, is something we do every day and that restarts practically every moment.

We should get rid of such essentialist visions, such a narrow interpretation, and we should be able to adopt a more relaxed, more integrating, more flexible, more ductile vision, and one that takes the historical past as an element of knowledge and not as a kind of universal destiny. We should try not to have it so present in our heads as some would have us believe today.

And why has the unitary, exclusive and monolithic vision of Spanish identity been reborn?

I believe it is due to many factors. A Spanish society that for 400 years was very homogeneous, especially from a religious point of view, has changed radically in 40 or 50 years. What we are seeing is the shock that this is producing. There are many sectors that seek to return to a vision of Spain that idealizes this idea of a homogeneous past that must continue to be homogeneous in our days. This is to go against one’s own history and one’s own evidence. And I believe that it does not help us to build a better society. Quite the contrary. It is leading us to build a more sectarian and exclusionary society. We historians have also made certain mistakes, in the sense that we have perhaps thought too naively that these myths were a thing of the past, of Franco’s regime, and that they were not going to return. However, we are finding to our astonishment that they are coming back.

Diversity is not a value in itself. It’s not a great thing, but it raises problems and generates tensions. And we are seeing those tensions coming to the surface. I personally believe that we still have time to be able to channel these tensions in a much more positive and integrating direction.

Is this phenomenon of exclusionary nationalism a cold or a pneumonia that will cause serious problems of coexistence in the coming decades?

Cold and pneumonia is something that is not up to us. The point is that we must be able to convince as many people as possible that the future is going to be what we decide. We are at a crossroads and deep down I am an optimist. If we manage to demonstrate that there is a notion of citizenship that can be much more inclusive, better informed, with better knowledge, I think we can come to propose forms of shared history that today some are trying to deny.

We still have time to manage this in a better way. Everything has caught us all a bit by surprise. We didn’t see it coming and I think we are becoming more and more aware of the implications. I try to contribute a small grain of sand to a debate that should be more rational, calmer and, above all, better informed than it has been so far.

What is threatening Spain’s immense architectural and cultural legacy today?

There are two aspects. One stems from the maintenance itself. Global warming, natural disasters, torrential rains like the ones we are seeing are affecting heritage. A couple of days ago, for example, I saw how the tower of a medieval castle near Madrid, the Escalona Castle, collapsed, possibly due to the heavy rains of recent times. The other problem is the growing massification and touristification, but above all the trivialization of heritage. The need for heritage to simply be an element to attract visitors by number and to be commoditized. That heritage, far from being a resource, becomes a commodity. And this is where a number of very worrying signs are already emerging. The pressure is really starting to get too much. And we should be increasingly aware of the public nature of heritage and of the need to prevent its enormous knowledge potential from being trivialized.

The year 2025 has closed with 97 million tourists, an unprecedented record. Can we die of success?

We are already dying of success. These are visitor numbers unacceptable for some places . The Sagrada Familia is already at 3 million visitors. The problem is that it is very difficult to manage. You cannot turn heritage into an elitist element, but neither can you allow this massification to end up generating deterioration. Increased visitor numbers are not necessarily a good thing for heritage. Once there is a social consensus on this, which should include heritage managers and social agents of all kinds, we must seek formulas for this heritage to be decongested.

It is a rather complicated issue in which we do not have all the solutions, but today we are beginning to have tools that allow us to know which are the tourist centers and how they develop. And with these data we must begin to work towards the sustainability of certain heritage sites. And that the visit to these places, far from being a simple and meaningless wandering, becomes an enriching and knowledgeable experience.

I read on the back cover of the book the following: “Historical heritage conceived as a democratic conquest with no other owner than the citizenship”. Do we really own our assets?

Absolutely. Heritage has not always existed. It is a concept that was generated throughout the 19th century. And it is a concept that allows real collections of paintings to become the Prado Museum, for example. This was not a real grace, but a democratic conquest that was made especially during the years of theDemocraticSexenio . Or, for example, during the years of the Republic that, for the first time, established patrimonial protection as an element framed in the Constitution. Therefore, it is a democratic conquest and this implies that heritage should not be patrimonialized by identities, economic groups or spurious interests. And it implies that we are all aware that it is something we pay for with our taxes and, therefore, we have to defend it as ours. We must resist the privatization attempts that are increasingly taking place, because one of the things about massification is that initiatives are attempted that benefit only a few.

I also read in the book the following: “The immatriculations have assured the Church the ownership of thousands of monuments and the ideological control of the content”. Has the public administration abdicated its duty of care?

Since the 19th century, the public administration has always had many disputes with the Church when it came to managing a historical heritage of which it was a very large depository. It is not in vain that a very important part of the history of Spain is marked by the role of the Church. I do not know to what extent he has resigned, but I do know that this is a matter in which due diligence has not always been exercised. Common interests that should be at the service of the citizens have not always been put on the table. This is becoming increasingly difficult to solve because elements that were not considered merchandise 30, 40 or 50 years ago are now monetizable.

The particular interests of the Church have been put on the table and the public administrations should be very vigilant because they have the constitutional obligation to defend the historical heritage. I don’t say so: the Constitution says so. People should know that if today we know our heritage better, it is precisely because public administrations have invested a lot, not only in its conservation but also in the training of professionals, restorers and archaeologists.

In terms of religious heritage, has the right to worship overridden the right to culture in terms of dissemination?

I think it has been quite the opposite. The right to worship has not worked that way. In fact, if you look, for example, the major cathedrals in this country have almost all been converted into museums and worship has been relegated to chapels. The Cathedral of Burgos is now a museum. If you are a religious person and want to go to pray you have a chapel with a different entrance. Heritage has become a commodity and this is affecting everyone. The Church is aware. A few years ago you would walk into a cathedral and see it quietly with people praying.

But the Church uses heritage as an instrument of evangelization and in some cases has falsified much of its interpretation. The case of the Mosque of Cordoba is evident.

Of course. What the Church often thinks is that if millions of visitors come, it is a good opportunity for evangelization. This happens with the Church, but it is also done elsewhere. You go to certain heritage sites in Catalonia and you find certain messages. In places where a more shared and diverse historical vision should be given, the Church pretends to monopolize the discourse. And this clashes with the very character of the building. An obvious case is that of the Mosque of Cordoba. And it is not a good idea because it does not allow to welcome in good conditions visits that are more and more diverse. Touristification itself generates people coming from all over the world and with very different beliefs and values. A mistake is made if we only think in terms of evangelization.

The case of Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago mansion is striking. The paradox of an avowed Islamophobe having a large part of his mansion decorated with Nasrid tiles bought in Spain.

They are not Nasrid tiles. The matter comes from a couple of American millionaires, the Havemeyers, who came to Spain at the end of the 19th century. And in Granada they bought some tiles which, they were told, came from a palace of Charles V in Guadix. When they arrived in New York, they were warned: “No. These tiles are not from a palace of Charles V in Guadix because Charles V had no palace in Guadix. The story is false. The tiles are imitation tiles with some Mudejar elements, but it also has lions and other motifs.

The Havemeyers didn’t quite know what to do with the tiles and sold them to the woman who was building the Mar-A-Lago residence. Some publications continue to say that it is the best collection of Mudejar tiles that exists outside of Spain. And it really isn’t. The reality is that they were ripped off and charged an outrageous amount for something that was worth much less. Mar-A-Lago is a place that has a very interesting history because it is built as a pastiche with very different elements, some also of Hispanic origin or imitating Spanish architecture.

Is Aragonese Mudejar architecture the victory of the vanquished?

I don’t know if it is appropriate to put it in terms of victory. What it does reveal is the fact that at the time when this architecture develops, especially in the lower middle ages, there is a shared taste. Christians on one side and Muslims on the other, and both are able to appreciate a way of building and decorating that goes beyond religious differences. It’s a pretty impressive thing that you don’t see in many places. That you have a church steeple that can perfectly resemble the minaret of a mosque is a truly exceptional situation. We tend to think of heritage elements as belonging to a particular style or function. Many times the Mudejar artisans themselves introduced hidden messages into the heritage and, in that sense, I don’t know if it is correct to look at it in terms of victory or defeat. Maybe so. The truth is that I have not given it much thought, although I find the other vision more interesting: that of sharing an architectural taste that can combine elements of such different origins.

Aristoteles Moreno