A Spain holding all of the
Iberian Peninsula became a topic in
Spanish nationalism beginning in the 19th century, with proponents idealizing historical
Roman Hispania when all of the Iberian Peninsula was united under the same rule. The identification of a unified Hispanian cultural heritage both encompassing Portugal and Spain had been developed centuries earlier with the publishing of
Juan de Mariana's
History of Spain (1598), in which Mariana supported a Hispanian identity based on the
Reconquista, on both countries' Roman-
Visigothic heritage and their common Catholic and monarchical polities. During the
Spanish Civil War, the
Carlists and the
Falange (prior to the two parties' unification in 1937) both promoted the incorporation of Portugal into Spain. The Carlists stated that a Carlist Spain would retake Gibraltar and conquer Portugal. The Falange, both prior to and after its merger with the Carlists, supported the unification of Gibraltar and Portugal into Spain. During its early years, the Falange produced maps that showed Portugal as a province of Spain. After the victory of the
Nationalist faction led by
Francisco Franco in the Civil War, radical members of the Falange called for the incorporation of Portugal and the
French Pyrenees into Spain. Franco in a communiqué with
Germany on 26 May 1942 declared that Portugal should be annexed into Spain. The years of
World War II were fertile in the projection by several authors of irredentist fantasies across the
Strait of Gibraltar (after all the Strait was to become the "neuralgic point of nationality" to them): according to the
Africanist Tomás García Figueras "Spain and Morocco are like two halves of the same geographical unity". Historian
Jaume Vicens Vives (1940) talked about a "vital space" conceptualised as a "geopolitical basic unit".
Rodolfo Gil Benumeya traced the links back to the
Neolithic Era, pointing to a common
Ibero-
Berber people living on both sides of the Strait. Gil Benumeya and
Hernández Pacheco stressed the strengthening of those links due to Morocco once being "
Mauritania Tingitana", part of the Roman
Diocese of Hispania. Some of these authors, transcending historical arguments, even pointed at the Spanish-African union during "the
Tertiary Epoch" when the Strait did not exist. ==See also==