Home› Europe›Southern Europe›Spain
Music of Spain
Flamenco and fado, Sardinian cantu a tenore, Neapolitan song, tarantella and pizzica, Corsican paghjella, Greek rebetiko and island nisiotika.
Sung and searched in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque. The YouTube button above can run your search in that language.
A brief history
Origins
Throughout its history, the Iberian Peninsula has received musical influences from around the Mediterranean Sea and across Europe. In the two centuries before the Christian era, Roman rule introduced the music and ideas of Ancient Greece. Early Christians, who had their own differing versions of church music, arrived during the height of the Roman Empire. The Visigoths, a Romanized Germanic people, took control of the peninsula following the fall of the Roman Empire, and later the Moors and Jews arrived in the Middle Ages. These more than two thousand years of internal and external influences produced a large number of unique musical traditions that continue to shape Spanish music today.
Popular music
20th century
By the early 20th century, Spanish music was largely divorced from the intellectual sphere, an ongoing trend since the 18th century, and thus the literary movements of the period largely lacked overlap with musicians. However, the two spheres had begun to collaborate again by the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Opera in Spain struggled in the 20th century, with many theatres closing, including the Teatro Real. However, orchestral music gained more opportunities, with the establishment of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid, the Sociedad Filarmónica de Madrid, and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra in the 1900s and 1910s. Choral music saw a similar boost, with the establishment of permanent choirs across the country, and chamber music secured a place in the country with a number of quartets. The Madrid and Barcelona conservatories were "lively centers of musical life".
Read the full article: Music of Spain Text under CC BY-SA 4.0
Playing now
What Spain is listening to in 2026
Articles
No articles for Spain yet. Save a Markdown file to content/articles/ with
country: Spain in its front matter.
Live radio
Radio from Spain
Music only, no news or talk. Stations that play the local tradition come first, then the most listened. They play in the corner of the page.
Station directory by Radio Browser Streams come from each station's own server.