History

The Iranian Alans were one of the people groups to settle Spain after the fall of the Roman Empire, but both countries have experienced Arab conquest after the initial expansion of Islam in the 700s. After the outbreak of a revolution in Arab-occupied Iran, the Umayyad Caliph fled to Spain. Timur, the Transoxanian ruler of Iran, bestowed a high position of honor to the Castilian Ambassador in the early 15th century, an affront to the Chinese ambassador.^[3]

When the Ottomans began threatening Europe, Western kingdoms including Spain looked to Iran as a potential ally against the Ottomans; Charles, then king of Spain as Charles I, sent an envoy to the Shah of Iran in 1516-1519 with this purpose in mind. On 18 February 1529, Charles V, deeply alarmed by the Ottoman progression towards Vienna, again sent a letter from Toledo to Shah Ismail, who had died in 1524 and had been replaced by Shah Tahmasp, pleading for a military diversion.^[4][5][6] His ambassador to the Shah was the knight of Saint John de Balbi, and an alliance was made with the objective of making an attack on the Ottoman Empire in the west and the east within the following year.^[7][6][8] Tahmasp also responded by expressing his friendship to the Emperor.^[5] A decision was thus taken to attack the Ottoman Empire on both fronts,^[9] but Balbi took more than one year to return to the Iran, and by that time the situation had changed in Iran, as Iran was forced to make peace with the Ottoman Empire because of an insurrection of the Shaybanid Uzbeks.^[7] Contacts heightened with the Persian embassy to Europe (1599-1602), the final portion of which took place in Spain, where the Iranians met with king Philip III, and obtained seaborne transportation from Portugal to the Strait of Hormuz and Persia.^[10] In a final incident however, one of the members of the embassy, a religious mullah, was stabbed to death by a Spaniard in Mérida.^[11] The Iranians sent another embassy after 1609, but relations worsened when Shah Abbas seized Portuguese Hormuz.

Iran and Spain were among the only few countries to protest the 18th-century partitions of Poland.^[12][13]

20th century

As for the evolution of these relations, there is a parallel between Spain and a good part of the rest of the EU countries. The certain thaw in relations with President Aznar's visit to Iran in 2002 and President Khatami's visit to Spain that same year, was followed by President Ahmadinejad's eight years. From the events of 2009 and the worsening of the nuclear issue, official relations between Iran and Spain, as a member of the EU, were affected, especially with the approval of EU sanctions in January 2012, its entry into force in the summer of that year and its hardening in subsequent months. The expression of this situation is the absence of official trips, delegations or visits of senior officials between the two countries between 2010 and the fall of 2013.^{[citation needed]}

During the protests in Iran of 2021-2022, Spain, together with most of the countries of Europe, condemned the repressions of the theocratic government against the Iranian population.^[14]