In 1992, the Universal Exhibition of Seville, the Barcelona Olympic Games and Madrid designated as the European Capital of Culture furnished Spain with an aura of normalisation and international prestige. The rebirth of a State project was lauded, with parallels drawn between the modernity represented by the arrival to the Americas in 1492 and socialist Spain, which deemed its transition concluded and became standardised with other liberal European democracies.   

The Universal Exhibition of Seville’s promotional strategy reformulated nostalgic motifs broadly exploited by Francoism, with a tendency to reminisce about the so-called Golden Age between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time when Spain was a powerful force in world geopolitics with its vast overseas empire. Consequently, these celebrations extolled the origins of colonialism, silencing conflictive aspects such as the exploitation of resources, violence and the current ramifications of such historical events. 

The promotional materials and advertising campaigns on television and in other media turned to the epic of navigation and its great feats with references to the caravels led by Christopher Columbus as an icon, the advances in cartography, the problematic notion of “discovery” and the nebulous concept of encountering cultures. These elements all appeared destined to lay down a consensus devoid of nuance: an attempt to make the official discourse orbiting around the Fifth Centenary since the start of Spanish colonisation of the Americas popular, unassailable and unequivocal.