Restoration (Spain)

Kingdom of Spain
Reino de España
1874–1931
Motto: Plus Ultra (Latin)
"Further Beyond"
Anthem: Marcha Real (Spanish)
"Royal March"
The Kingdom of Spain and its overseas colonies in 1898
CapitalMadrid
Common languagesSpanish
Religion
Roman Catholicism (state religion)
DemonymSpaniards
GovernmentUnitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy
King 
• 1874–1885
Alfonso XII
• 1886–1931
Alfonso XIII
Regent 
• 1885–1902
Maria Christina
Prime Minister 
• 1874–1875 (first)
Antonio Cánovas
• 1931 (last)
Juan B. Aznar
LegislatureCortes Generales
Senate
Congress of Deputies
History 
29 December 1874
30 June 1876
April–August 1898
1909–1910
• Rif War
1920–1926
14 April 1931
CurrencySpanish peseta
Preceded by
Succeeded by
First Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic

The Restoration (Spanish: Restauración) or Bourbon Restoration (Spanish: Restauración borbónica) was the period in Spanish history between the First Spanish Republic and the Second Spanish Republic from 1874 to 1931. It began on 29 December 1874, after a pronunciamento by General Arsenio Martínez Campos in Valencia ended the First Spanish Republic and restored the Bourbon monarchy under King Alfonso XII, and ended on 14 April 1931 with the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic.

After nearly a century of political instability and several civil wars, the Restoration attempted to establish a new political system that ensured stability through the practice of turno, an intentional rotation of liberal and conservative parties in leadership, often achieved through electoral fraud. Critics of the turnismo system included republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists, Basque and Catalan nationalists, and Carlists. However, the relative stability to the turnismo system outlived its creator, the Conservative politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, and characterised the era with comparative peace, despite great social inequalities in the agricultural areas of Spain, and sporadic unrest relating to military defeats abroad.

During the interwar period, the Bourbon monarchy tied itself to the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923, an event that succeeded by means of both a military coup d'état and the acquiescence of King Alfonso XIII. It took the protracted political turmoil in the wake of economic depression, caused by the aftermath of the First World War, and the Spanish defeat at the Annual in Morocco for the restored monarchy to be swept away with Rivera's dictatorship, ending with the general being forced to resign in 1930 and the king's voluntary dethronement and exile to Fascist Italy in 1931.