The invention of photography in the 19th century found Spain in a period of transition. Great changes were under way, but much of its population still led simple rural lives and many of the monuments to its earlier golden age sat derelict and neglected.

Click through the gallery for a selection of evocative images that capture Spain at this intriguing juncture in its history. To enjoy them FULL SCREEN on a desktop, click the icon in the top right...

This evocative image of a man dressed in traditional Moorish garb, framed by an arched window in the Alhambra in Granada, was taken by British photographer Charles Clifford in 1850. It had been commissioned by Isabella II, Queen of Spain, but quickly captured the imagination of the world.

The image featured in the wildly successful German photographic book, Die Baukunst Spaniens. Its depiction of the rich ornamentation of the Alhambra’s Moorish architecture is said to have influenced designers across Europe throughout the rest of the century.

The Isabel II bridge across the Guadalquivir River in Seville is the oldest iron bridge in Spain and an enduring symbol of the city. But before it was opened in 1852, the only bridge across the city was a ‘bridge of boats’, dating from the rule of Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf in the 12th century.

That bridge consisted of 13 boats tied with chains, with planks resting between them. This photo, taken by Viscount de Vigier in 1851, shows the bridge of boats moved down river while the new bridge was under construction.

This ornate marble fountain featuring the goddess Cibeles astride a lion-drawn chariot was built in 1782. These days, fans of Real Madrid gather around it to celebrate their football team’s (many) victories. Back when this photo was taken in 1855, however, it was used by water carriers to fill their carts with water which they then distributed throughout the city.

Eagle-eyed Madrileans will notice that the fountain was still at the start of Paseo de Recoletos when this photo was taken. It was moved to its current location on Plaza de Cibeles in 1895.

This striking stone bridge links Martorell to Castellbisbal in Catalonia and dates back to the 17th century. It was originally an aqueduct, but by the 19th century it was used primarily as a bridge, with the small structure at its peak housing a toll collector.

The highest part of the arch is quite thin. Legend has it that a local peasant lady promised the devil her soul if he built the bridge before the rooster's crow at daybreak. With a few stones to go, she saved her soul by throwing cold water on the bird to make it squawk.

In 1856, the Scottish astronomer, Charles Piazzi Smyth dragged a Sheepshanks Equatorial telescope to the top of Mount Guajara in Tenerife hoping that the height and ‘most serene and quiet air’ here would afford a clearer view than the one he was getting in Edinburgh.

It did. So much so that he was able to determine that the circular cavities in the moon were indeed craters. Here we see Smyth, sitting at the base of the telescope, wearing a white shirt.

Love this? Follow our Facebook for more history stories and travel inspiration

Here we see a group of locals wearing traditional clothes beside a well in Palma, on the Balearic island of Mallorca. The photo was taken by British photographer Charles Clifford when he visited the island in 1860.

At this time, Clifford was based in Spain and considered one of the leading photographers in the country. This is one of 56 photos he was commissioned to take for Antoine d'Orléans, a great collector and patron of photographers and the brother-in-law of Queen Isabella II.

Sitting virtually in the centre of Spain, Toledo has always been a strategically important city, both in Moorish and Christian times. But when this photo was taken in 1860, it had fallen upon hard times.

Little was left of the city after the French ransacked Toledo during the Peninsular War in 1808. Its monasteries were forcibly closed in the 1830s and the population dropped to about 13,000 people. The mighty medieval San Martin’s bridge stood firm though and remains one of the city’s most popular attractions.

Here we see a carter transporting huge clay jars across the dry arid fields of Murcia. The photo was taken by Jean Laurent, a French photographer who lived in Madrid and served as the official photographer for the Spanish queen between 1861 to 1868.

The huge jars were known as tinaja. They were used primarily for fermenting and storing wine, as well as oil and cereals. Sometimes they were used for storing meat.

Burgos is a major city in Spain’s Castile-Leon region and one of the main stops on the Camino de Santiago. But when this photo was taken in 1865, the city was struggling – having been pilfered by both the French and the British during the Peninsular War 40-odd years before.

Notice the city’s florid Gothic cathedral, towering over the city as it has done ever since it was completed in 1567. It boasts 15 chapels and was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1984.

This scene captures the hustle and bustle of Córdoba’s busy marketplace, with basket weavers and ropemakers displaying their wares on the cobbled street and along the wall behind them. The baskets were made from esparto, a kind of needle grass, harvested from the sierras surrounding the town.

Working with esparto is a craft that goes back thousands of years in the region. Just 13 years before this photo was taken, a farmer in Albuñol (near Granada) stumbled upon Neolithic mummified human remains surrounded by baskets made with esparto grass.

Another photo by French photographer, Jean Laurent, this time taken as he travelled around the country documenting the traditional dress of the various regions of Spain. Here he captures two local men standing in the doorway of a home in Murcia, listening to a woman playing a guitarro, a small five-string Baroque guitar particular to the area.

Sometime in the 1880s, a lonely cart trundles through Palmeral de Elche, the largest palm grove in Europe. The cultivation of date palms in Elche dates back to the 5th century BC, but it wasn’t until the end of the 10th century AD, during Arab rule, that the industry flourished.

The Arabs laid out date palms as orchards and installed sophisticated irrigation systems. UNESCO recognised the cultural importance of the grove in 2000, and today, walking among the 200,000+ palms is a highlight of any visit to this historic city in southeastern Spain.

Formed during the Jurassic period and home to Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Berbers, this limestone promontory overlooking the entrance to Mediterranean has been a British territory ever since they captured it during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1704.

Despite many attempts by the Spanish to recapture it, ‘The Rock’ has steadfastly remained a British territory, with the Royal Navy building a torpedo-proof harbour to protect it barely a decade after this photo was taken.

Fishing was very much a family occupation in Valencia when this photo was taken. Skills were passed down from father to son, with mothers and daughters working equally hard on shore while they were out to sea.

That way of life would soon change irrevocably. The Industrial Revolution was bringing great changes to Spain and to Seville. The coming of the railway would see the city’s port expand and a push towards large scale commercial fishing enterprises.

The Spanish seaman and inventor, Isaac Peral, is regarded as the ‘father of modern submarines’. His 72-foot-long (22m) submersible vessel, the ‘Peral’ (pictured), launched in 1888, was powered by electricity and the first to incorporate torpedo-firing facilities.

Here we see the Peral in Cádiz Bay near San Fernando near Cádiz in 1889, about to embark on a testing mission where it would successfully blow up an old hull anchored about three miles (5km) from the shore.

This compelling photo of Plaza del Grano in León is undated, but the clothes worn by the locals suggest that it was taken some time in the 1890s.

The stern priest stands before the Santa María del Camino, known by locals as the Church of the Market. This 12th-century Romanesque church has Gothic alterations and is peculiar in that the height of its naves decreases from the far end of the church to the main entrance.

See more evocative images of Europe taken in the early days of photography

The old fish market at Puerta de Toledo in Madrid was just one part of the mercantile community that thrived here in the 19th century. Farmers from the surrounding countryside would set up stalls here too, selling their produce to good citizens of Madrid in the streets and cramped spaces around it.

When this photo was taken around 1890, the fish market’s days were numbered. In 1875, the city built a beautiful Victorian-style covered market in the heart of La Latina. Soon, the local fishmongers joined the farmers in the exodus to the salubrious new quarters.

Málaga is one of Spain’s oldest cities. The Phoenicians founded the city in the 12th century BC and called it Malaka, from the word malac, meaning ‘to salt.’

For much of the 19th century, it was also one of Spain’s leading industrial powerhouses, famed for both its iron and textiles. It was a leading artistic centre too. Pablo Picasso was born in the city in 1881, a decade or so before this photo was taken.

After being burned to the ground by Portuguese-Anglo troops during the Peninsula War in 1813, the Basque city of Donostia-San Sebastián was rebuilt in lavish style to become a fashionable seaside resort.

City planners laid out a modern town extending from banks of the Urumea River to the broad beaches on La Concha Bay, crowning it with lavish Belle Époque public buildings and theatres that were stylish and beautiful and fit for a queen. Indeed, when this photo was taken, the city was the summer residence of Spain’s Queen Maria Cristina.

The Fountain of Neptune in Zaragoza was built in 1833 and took its design cues from the Fountain of Neptune in Paseo del Prado in Madrid. It was built in honour of the future Queen Isabel II, still a princess at the time, hence why it was also known as the Princess Fountain. It was the first monumental fountain built in the city.

It had a practical purpose too, serving as a water supply until 1902. In that year, the fountain was dismantled and moved to Parque Grande José Antonio Labordeta.

This unlikely tableau, captured beside the River Darro in the shadow of the walls and towers of the Alhambra in Grenada, is obviously staged. Photographic equipment was still large and clunky and taking a stereoscopic image like this one was complicated and time-consuming.

Nevertheless, the photograph does capture the simple lives the people of Granada were living towards the end of the 19th century. The grand Moorish palace behind them was indeed sophisticated and spectacular. But the locals were still drawing water directly from the river.

Sitting on the Bay of Cádiz, the port town of El Portil in Huelva province has a proud history of fishing that dates way back to Phoenician times. They were famously adept at the ancient Almadraba technique that saw them stringing nets from one side of the Strait of Gibraltar to the other, catching the tuna as they migrated from the cold waters of the Atlantic into the Mediterranean in the spring.

This photo taken in 1899 shows the bounty brought by Almadraba technique, with fishermen from El Portil struggling to cope with the vast number of tuna caught in their nets, trapped as they headed into the Mediterranean to spawn.

Córdoba’s Roman bridge was built in the 1st century BC and provided vital passage across the Guadalquivir River. Its 16 arches supported by irregular semi-cylindrical buttresses always caught the eye, with Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi claiming that it surpassed 'all other bridges in beauty and solidity' in 1140.

Here we see two men standing before the mighty bridge around 1900. Just over one hundred years later, it would double as ‘The Long Bridge of Volantis’ in the popular TV series, Game of Thrones.

Caves have provided people shelter in the Canary Islands since prehistoric times. The first cave houses were created by the Guanches, the native people of the Canary Islands, and were little more than an excavated room with a fire pit and basic furnishing.

By the time this photo was taken, these cave dwellings were much more sophisticated, featuring carved walls, ceilings and doorways. They were used not just as homes, but as churches and granaries as well. Indeed, visitors to the islands can still stay in a cave house, albeit one with all the mod cons.

Here we see ships anchored in Barcelona’s busy port in 1898. Note the city’s famous Columbus Monument, built just 10 years earlier to celebrate the great explorer’s exploits as part of the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition.

The 197-foot (60m) high monument sits at the bottom of La Ramblas and is topped by a bronze likeness of Christoper Columbus pointing south-southeast. The Americas, which he famously discovered, sit in almost the exact opposite direction.

Today, Madrid’s Manzanares River is lined by parks and cycle paths. At the turn of the 20th century, it was a huge makeshift laundromat where thousands of women scrubbed and pounded dirty clothes and sheets, brought to them by carters and carriers from all corners of the city.

Row after row of washing was then hung to dry along the stretch of river between Puente de Segovia and Puente de Toledo. Residents complained about the noise and the soapiness of the river. But right up until the 1940s, it was how Madrileans got their washing done.

Holy Week has been an important celebration in Seville since the 16th century. Every Easter, 71 different brotherhoods and religious guilds carry huge religious-themed sculptures called pasos through the city, accompanied by drums and music and cheered on by crowds of people who press in from all sides.

Here we see a paso being carried outside of the Church of San Jacinto. It is a representation of Jesus at the third station of the cross, where he falls for the first time, staggering under the weight of his wooden crucifix and the sins of the world.

Back in the late 19th century, Seville’s famous oranges were prized not for their sweetness but their bitterness. Their unique, earthy and slightly sour taste was preferred to vinegar as a zesty addition in cooking and to dress salads. They were also an essential ingredient in English marmalade.

As such, it was not uncommon to see orange sellers like this lad, wandering the dusty streets of Seville, offering oranges freshly plucked from the trees that lined the city streets, to be used as a spritz on that evening’s fish supper.

The Fiestas del Pilar is an annual festival held in Zaragoza every October in honour of the Aragonese city’s patron saint, the Virgen del Pilar. The week-long festivities include theatre, concerts and puppets shows and culminates in the Parade of Giants, Big Heads and Little Horses.

The tradition began in 1807, with each of the giants representing one of Earth's continents. When this photo was taken, they had come to represent famous characters like the King and Queen and even Don Quixote. The parade was declared an Asset of Intangible Cultural Interest in 2024.

One hundred and twenty years after this photo was taken, Barcelona’s world famous Sagrada Família remains unfinished. The spectacularly audacious cathedral was designed by the eccentric Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and remains the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world.

Construction had already been underway for 23 years when these two dashing gentlemen stopped for a chat in 1905. The current estimation is that it will be finally finished in 2026, in time for the centenary of Gaudí’s death.

Now see how we've ranked Spain's bucket-list attractions