CATALONIA, OUR COUNTRY...

Catalonia is one of the seventeen autonomous communities of the Kingdom of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona. Its capital city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an official population of 7,535,251. It borders France and Andorra to the north, Aragon to the west, the Valencian Community to the south, and the Mediterranean Sea to the east (580 km coastline). The official languages are Spanish, Catalan and Aranese.

The name Catalunya (Catalonia) began to be used in the 11th century in reference to the group of counties that comprised the Spanish March. The origin of the term is subject to diverse interpretations. A theory suggests that Catalunya derives from the term "Land of Castles", having evolved from the term castlà, the ruler of a castle. This theory therefore suggests that the name Castille and Catalonia have the same etymology, though critics question this.
Another theory suggests that Catalunya (Latin Gathia Launia) derives from the name Gothia (or Gauthia), "Land of the Goths", since the Spanish March was first known as Gothia, whence Gothland > Gothlandia > Gothalania > Catalonia theoretically derived.
Yet another less accepted theory points to the Lacetani, an Iberian tribe that lived in the area and whose name, due to the Roman influence, could have evolved by metathesis to Katelans and then Catalans.

Like some other parts in the rest of the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, Catalonia was colonised by Ancient Greeks, who settled around the Roses area. Both Greeks and Carthaginians (who, in the course of the Second Punic War, briefly ruled the territory) interacted with the main Iberian substratum. After the Carthaginian defeat by Rome, it became, along with the rest of Hispania, part of the Roman Empire, Tarraco being one of the main Roman posts in the Iberian Peninsula.
Catalonia then came under Visigothic rule for four centuries after Rome's collapse. In the 8th century, it came under Moorish al-Andalus control. Still, after the defeat of Emir Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi's troops at Tours in 732, the Franks conquered former Visigoth states which had been captured by the Muslims or had become allied with them in what today is the northernmost part of Catalonia. Charlemagne created in 795 what came to be known as the Marca Hispanica, a buffer zone beyond the province of Septimania made up of locally administered separate petty kingdoms which served as a defensive barrier between the Umayyad Moors of Al-Andalus and the Frankish Kingdom.
The Catalan culture started to develop during the Middle Ages in a number of these petty kingdoms organised as small counties throughout the northernmost part of Catalonia. The counts of Barcelona were Frankish vassals nominated by the emperor and then the king of France, to whom they were feudatories (801–987).
In 987 the count of Barcelona did not recognize the French king Hugh Capet and his new dynasty, which put Catalonia effectively beyond Frankish rule. In 1137, Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona married Queen Petronila of Aragon, establishing the dynastic union of the County of Barcelona with the Kingdom of Aragon that was to create the Crown of Aragon.
It was not until 1258, by means of the Treaty of Corbeil, that the king of France formally relinquished his feudal lordship over the counties of the Principality of Catalonia to the king of Aragon James I, descendant of Ramon Berenguer IV. This Treaty transformed the region's de facto autonomy into a de jure direct Aragonese rule. As part of the Crown of Aragon, Catalonia became a maritime power, helping expand the Crown by trade and conquest into the Kingdom of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and ultimately even Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica, Naples, Athens.
Aragon had been very severely hit by the Black Death and by continuing outbreaks of plague. According to John Huxtable Elliott, "Between 1347 and 1497 the Principality had lost 37% of its inhabitants, and was reduced to a population of something like 300,000."
In 1410, King Martin I died without surviving descendants. As a result, by the Pact of Caspe, Ferdinand of Antequera from the Castilian dynasty of Trastamara, received the Crown of Aragon as Ferdinand I of Aragon.
His grandson, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Queen Isabella I of Castile married in 1469, becoming los Reyes Catolicos; subsequently, this event was seen as the dawn of the Kingdom of Spain. At that point, though personally and informally unified, both Crowns of Castile and Aragon maintained distinct territories, each keeping its own traditional institutions, Parliaments and laws. Castile commissioned the expeditions to the Americas, and benefited from the colonial riches. Political power had shifted away from Aragon toward Castile and, subsequently, from Castile to the Spanish Empire. King Charles V was the first sole monarch holding the crowns of both Aragon and Castile.
For an extended period, Barcelona (not Catalonia), as part of the former Kingdom of Aragon, continued to retain its own usages and laws, but these gradually eroded in the course of the transition from feudalism to a modern state, fueled by the kings' struggle to have more centralized territories. Over the next few centuries, Catalonia was generally on the losing side of a series of local conflicts that led steadily to more centralization of power in Spain, like the Reapers' War (1640–52). In 1659 the Spanish Crown offered the Roussillon territory to the Kingdom of France. Now this territory is the Department of Pyrénées-Orientales, and also is named Northern Catalonia (Catalunya Nord).
The most significant conflict was the War of the Spanish Succession, which began when Charles II of Spain (the last Spanish Habsburg) died without a direct heir in 1700. Catalonia, like the other territories that had formed the Crown of Aragon in the Middle Ages, mostly rose up in support of the Habsburg pretender Charles VI of Valencia Holy Roman Emperor, while the rest of Spain mostly adhered to the French Bourbon claimant, Philip V. Following the fall of Barcelona on 11 September 1714, the "special status" of the territories belonging to the former Crown of Aragon and its institutions was abolished by the Nueva Planta decrees, under which all its lands were incorporated to the Crown of Castile as provinces, within a united Spanish administration, as Spain moved towards a centralised government under the new Bourbon dynasty.
In the latter half of the 19th century, Catalonia became an industrial center; to this day it remains one of the most industrialised parts of Spain. In the first third of the 20th century, Catalonia gained and lost varying degrees of autonomy several times, receiving its first statute of autonomy during the Second Spanish Republic (1931). This period was marked by political unrest and the preeminence of the Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The Anarchists had been active throughout the early 20th century, achieving the first eight-hour workday in the world in 1919. After the defeat of the Republic in the civil war, which brought General Francisco Franco to power, his regime suppressed any kind of public activities associated with Catalan nationalism, Anarchism, Socialism, Democracy or Communism, including the publication of books on those subjects or simply discussion of them in open meetings. As part of this suppression, the use of Catalan in government-run institutions and during public events was banned. During later stages of the Franco Régime, certain folkloric and religious celebrations in Catalan resumed and were tolerated. Use of Catalan in the mass media had been forbidden, but was permitted from the early 1950's in the theatre. Publishing in Catalan continued throughout the dictatorship.
After Franco's death (1975) and with the adoption of a democratic Spanish constitution (1978), Catalonia recovered political and cultural autonomy. Today, Catalonia is one of the most economically dynamic regions of Spain. The Catalan capital and largest city, Barcelona, is a major international cultural centre and a major tourist destination.