Regions of Spain
Aragón: the Autonomous Community
By m.p. - Nov 18, 2007 - 2:26 PM
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The Comunidad Autonoma de Aragón covers an area of 47,719 square kilometres and is divided into three provinces: Huesca, Teruel, and Zaragoza, which is the regional capital.
The latest population figure for the region from the January 2006 census is 1,277,471, with figures per province: 218,023 for Huesca, 142,160 in Teruel, and, the most populous, Zaragoza, with 917,288. Zaragoza is also the largest province, covering an area of 17,275 kilometres.
Aragón makes up 9.42% of Spanish territory.
Population density is low in this, the fourth largest of Spain’s autonomous communities, with most of the population concentrated in and around the provincial capitals.
Situated in the north west of the peninsula, this land-locked region is bounded to the North by the Pyrenees forming a natural border with France, by Cataluña in the East and Valencia in the South. Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, La Rioja and Navarra all lie to the West.
The regional government is known as the Diputación General de Aragón and was born in its present form from the 1978 Constitution and the region’s original Statute of Autonomy, dating from 1982. The Diputación has its seat in Zaragoza – the political and administrative centre of the region – in the Edificio Pignatelli, built at the end of the 18th century. The Palacio de Aljafería is the seat of the regional parliament, Las Cortes de Aragón.
A reform of Aragon’s regional Statute was approved in 2007, and did not include any official recognition of Catalan and Aragonese as languages in the region, stating instead that no citizen could be discriminated against on the grounds of language. It also established, in the introduction to the text, that a future law of the Aragonese courts will determine the areas where the native languages of Aragón are spoken, regulating their protection, recovery and teaching provisions, with legislation covering Aragón’s own ‘languages and linguistic modalities’ in dealings with public administration and the rights of speakers to use them.
Castellano is the only official language in Aragón.
Aragonés, colloquially known as ‘fabla’ – literally, speech - is a romance language derived from Latin, and has four main groups of dialect. It is spoken by some 12,000 people in the region, mainly in the valleys of the Pyrenees: close to another 18,000 people are passive speakers, in other words, have some knowledge of the language, but may not be fluent.
The Catalan language is spoken in the districts adjacent to Cataluña, in the area known as ‘La Franja de Ponent,’ - ‘the Western Strip,’ in the eastern part of Aragón, where an estimated 45,000 people speak it as their first language.
The first pre-autonomous government met on 24th April 1978, presided over by Juan Antonio Bolea Foradada, of UCD – the Christian Democrat Party.
The first elections to Las Cortes de Aragón were held on 8th May 1983 and gave a victory to the PSOE party led by Santiago Marraco Solana.
The latest regional elections in 2007 was another victory for the Socialists, although they failed to achieve an absolute majority. The Socialist candidate, Marcelino Iglesias, was invested as the new regional President on 5th July 2007 in his third consecutive mandate, with the support of the nine regional MPs of the Partido Aragonés, and the votes of PSOE’s 30 members of Las Cortes de Aragón.
It gave him an absolute majority over the 38 members of the opposition: 23 from the Partido Popular, four from CHA, and the one member of the Izquierda Unida coalition with a seat in the regional parliament.
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