575 million years ago, in the late Pre Cambrian period is not
for many people a significant date, not like the Battle of
Hastings or Waterloo, but for Spain it became very significant
indeed. It was when Spain was born. At the time the land that
was to become Spain was on the southern edge of a vast ocean
well south of the equator and attached to the northern edge of a
continental plate that would, much later, become Africa. It was
a new addition to that plate, the volcanic processes that spewed
molten rock from the Earth's core into the atmosphere were
adding to the area of land above the sea on a daily basis. The
magma cooled and became granite on an Earth very different to
that of today. There was no life as we know it, the primitive
sea creatures that existed then were long extinct when the
trilobites arrived, the atmosphere contained little or no
oxygen, the land was coloured various shades of red and the sea
was green. Over millennia the peripatetic continental plates
roamed the Earth, colliding, combin