Famous Spanish people – all of Spain’s brightest and best

Who are some famous Spanish people?

Good question.

Back during the Great Recession, there was a lot of worry about Spain’s failed attempts to market itself internationally.

And one topic that always came up was the fact that a lot of people in the US probably don’t know much about famous Spanish people.

The Spaniards they certainly do know about are probably free-floating in many people’s minds within some sort of ambiguous Mexican / Puerto Rican / General Hispanic category…

(The fact that New Yorkers have spent the past century or so using “Spanish” to refer to anyone but “people from actual Spain, over in Europe” doesn’t help.)

So that’s the question of the day…

Who are the most famous Spanish people?

What are the Spanish doing for the world these days?

Well, several things.

I’m limiting this to living people – another day I’ll do a post about some important people from history. Spain had its glory days, after all, and there are a number of important artists from here in Iberia.

So today we’ve got Spanish actors (adult and otherwise), a couple of singers, and some very good athletes.

Anyway, here goes…

Antonio Banderas (actor)

Probably the most famous Spanish person these days is Antonio Banderas. He’s seemingly been around Hollywood forever, but he actually got his start in Spanish cinema.

Way back in the 80s, he was in several films directed by Pedro Almodóvar.

As such, he was part of the Movida Madrileña, which was apparently a lot of fun if you were around for it – the dictatorship was over and there was a sort of artistic revival, with lots of sex and drugs and wild self-expression.

Unfortunately, a lot of the people involved in la movida OD’d or died of AIDS and aren’t around anymore. But Banderas survived and eventually became Zorro, as well as El Mariachi from those Robert Rodriguez shoot-em-ups.

He’s also continued collaborating with Pedro Almodóvar.

I talked about a couple of Almodóvar / Banderas masterpieces in my article American Ignorance. And in another article, I mentioned the fact that Antonio Banderas is sometimes given awards as a “person of color” in Hollywood, because, as I said earlier, nobody was really thinking about Spain when they came up with these arbitrary racial categories. (Banderas is from Málaga, like Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous historical Spaniards.)

Pedro Almodovar (film director)

Almodóvar himself is very famous in Spain, but perhaps not a household name in the US. (Maybe he’s art-house famous, though. I wouldn’t really know.)

Anyway, he won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Talk to Her, which was actually pretty good.

A lot of his more recent films, in my humble opinion, suck.

And a lot of Spaniards don’t like him for portraying them as a nation of eccentrics and perverts.

Spanish people want, above all else, to be considered “normal” so they don’t appreciate their most famous film director making them look otherwise.

For an easy intro to Almodovar, check out Talk to Her, or Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Both are pretty good, if weird.

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem (actors)

Penélope Cruz (from Alcobendas, in the Comunidad de Madrid) and Javier Bardem (from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands) are two more Spaniards who have made it big in Hollywood.

And if you want some fun with Spanish stereotypes, you should see Jamón Jamón.

The film is like a compendium of every ridiculously Spanish thing you could imagine: an obsession with pork products, bulls and bullfighting, testicles and general male virility, prostitution, breasts…

It’s quite a feast for the senses.

Cruz and Bardem met during the filming of this movie, a full 15 years before Woody Allen cast them together in Vicky, Christina, Barcelona.

Jamón, jamón is pretty silly, but I liked it a lot. Now, apparently Bardem and Cruz are married (to each other) so I guess they’re a Spanish Hollywood power couple.

Rafael Nadal (tennis player)

Spain has some pretty good athletes.

See, for example, Rafael Nadal, from Majorca in the Balearic Islands – he’s considered one of the best tennis players of all time.

In a previous version of this article, a much younger me said that Nadal was “great at hitting a little green ball over a net, but in my mind, tennis doesn’t really qualify as a sport”.

That’s exactly the kind of thing younger me said a lot, and I was probably wrong. But as a guy who grew up in Arizona, I always took tennis to be a hobby for obnoxious rich people. It wasn’t a sport that regular people could just play.

(Tennis courts were somewhat rare out in the desert, I guess, and probably only existed at the kind of resorts I might have become a bellboy at if things had worked out a bit differently.)

Anyway, I’ve gained little to no appreciation for tennis through the years. Sorry Rafa.

These days, an up-and-coming talent is Carlos Alcaraz, from Murcia. At just 23 years old (at the time of this writing) he’s ranked number 2 in the world. He’s been winning major tournaments since age 19.

I guess we’ll be hearing more about him in the future.

Fernando Alonso (Formula One driver)

Speaking of sports that I don’t really appreciate, Fernando Alonso (from Oviedo, Asturias) is pretty good at driving wildly expensive cars around in circles.

They call it “Formula One” and I used to have a flatmate who watched it on weekends.

I could never get into it. But I guess it’s popular.

Apparently, Alonso is still active in Formula One, driving for Aston Martin.

I think in the US, Nascar is probably more popular than Formula One. All I know is that we have the Indianapolis 500, but I never would have watched such an event.

Back in high school, our library had an Indy 500 racing game on those big boxy computers. That was a lot of fun, but I wouldn’t say it got me interested in car racing any more than the Oregon Trail game got me into wagon trekking. (Although you should totally read the book The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck. It’s very good, even if you’re not a wagon aficionado.)

Moving on…

Honorable mention for Spanish athletes

The Spanish national football team won a World Cup back in 2010. And around Spain, some of the players were household names for a while.

(For example, thousands of Spanish boys born at that time are named Iker, after Iker Casillas, the charming and talented goalie for the national team and for Real Madrid.)

And football is very international, of course. But it’s still not big in the US, and I doubt that most Americans remember players like Carles Puyol from the 2010 team.

Gerard Pique was somewhat famous for his marriage to tax evader and occasional pop star Shakira. She’s from Colombia, but has had Spanish nationality since 2015.

But the most famous players from Spanish teams aren’t Spanish. Messi and Ronaldo, for example, are from Argentina and Portugal, respectively.

In the future, keep an eye out for a guy named Lamine Yamal, who plays for Barça. Born in 2007 to parents from Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, he’s Barcelona’s new star football player.

Spain also spent a few years producing good basketball players. Some went to play in the NBA: specifically Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol and Ricky Rubio (all from Catalonia), as well as some others.

Some Spaniards suspected, years ago, that the superlative awesomeness of our national sports was actually a conspiracy by the government to take people’s minds off the shittiness of the economy and the many corruption scandals.

An interesting theory, to be sure, but given that the government has just made everything else suck worse, I really don’t see how they could have managed to make the football team so good.

I have a whole article about that in Is the Spanish government hyptnotizing you?

Julio and Enrique Iglesias (singers)

Julio and Enrique Iglesias (both born in Madrid) are, of course, very popular singers.

Spanish people don’t get much more famous than this.

Anyway, something you might not know: Enrique has spent most of his life in the US, being sent there after his grandfather (the eminent gynaecologist Julio Iglesias Puga) was kidnapped by Basque Nationalists in back in 1981.

I guess it’s a long story and I don’t know much about it, but the whole Iglesias family has been kind of pissed off at Spain since then.

Incidentally, I don’t think I had listened to a single Julio Iglesias song until this morning. But it’s about what you’d expect a guy in a white suit from the 70s to sound like.

Enrique Iglesias is a good example of what I mean when I say that a lot of Americans might have a mental category for “general Hispanic” – Spanish-speaking musicians sometimes seem to be considered as one category or genre, regardless of where they’re from.

So to me, looking at pop music around the year 2000, there was no obvious difference between Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Gloria Estefan, etc. They were all just “Latin Music” or similar.

In the video for Enrique’s 1998 song Bailamos there’s nothing specifically Spanish going on…

And the video for his similarlly-themed 2014 song Bailando (with 3.6 billion views on YouTube) was filmed in the Dominican Republic and in Cuba.

In other words, it’s international Latin, and not a tribute to his roots in Málaga or Galicia.

Apparently, in fact, the Latin Grammys includes Spanish artists, and Julio Iglesias (the singer. not they gyno) has been inducted into the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame.

(I talk more about why we say Latin for things that are not canonically Latin in my article called America: a country and a continent. Check that out if you want.)

Rosalía (singer)

Another artist I’d never heard before this morning is Rosalía.

I know about her, of course. She’s the Motomami, the most famous Catalan person in history.

She’s also the youngest person on this list, born in 1992.

I wrote about famous Catalans in my Seven Hills article, and I’m not even joking – it’s between her and Salvador Dalí, and Salvador Dali didn’t have any songs with over a billion listens on Spotify. Rosalía has two.

Apparently, the Motomami’s first album was a collection of old flamenco songs called Los Ángeles – I think she’s referring to supernatural angels, not the city in California – and it’s shockingly good.

Have a listen on your favorite streaming service.

I loved it, and I don’t usually get into flamenco music that much.

Her later songs are in some genre I don’t understand, but I’m pretty sure Despechá is a great song, too…

Believe me, when I woke up this morning, I was ready to write Rosalía off as some shitty half-dressed pop star. Now I’m thinking that she’s a musical genius. Oh well. Life is surprising.

I guess she’s the most famous Catalan for a reason.

Honorable mention for Spanish musicians

Honorable mention in the musicians category goes to Los del Río, from Sevilla, who wrote the Macarena.

How a couple of old Sevillano guys had a global hit in the 90s is a story best told by Rob Harvilla, over at 60 Songs that Explain the 90s, one of my all-time favorite podcasts.

Also from Spain: the opera singer, composer and orchestra director Plácido Domingo, from Madrid, is well-known as one of The Three Tenors. The other two are, of course Luciano Pavarotti, who died in 2007, and José Carreras (from Barcelona), who, as the Seinfeld episode made clear, nobody can ever remember.

In general, though I find it hard to get into Spanish music.

They have a couple of hard rock acts from the 80s, a ton of flamenco-pop, and (now) a number of hip-hop or rap acts. But I can’t say I listen to most of it regularly.

And finally…

Nacho Vidal (porn star)

I’m not sure how famous “adult film star” Nacho Vidal is outside of his little niche, but he is the Spanish celebrity I’ve come closest to sharing a shower with.

Here’s the story: back when I was an amateur boxer in my Madrid days, I showed up to the gym for my usual class, only to find the place overrun by a bunch of showbiz types.

It was clear that they were showbiz types because nobody else at my gym would ever show up with fancy hairstyles and gold Adidas track suits.

Anyway, they were doing a boxing-themed photo shoot. Later on, somebody told me that it was Rolling Stone (well, Spanish Rolling Stone, anyway) doing a piece on Nacho Vidal.

I pretended to know who they were talking about, and googled him when I got home… I guess I had been just centimeters away from his famous wang in the locker room, without even knowing it.

I can’t find that Rolling Stone article, but elsewhere in the magazine I’ve seen Vidal referred to as a “penis-shaped candle entrepreneur”.

If I were writing that piece, I would have added an extra hyphen to “penis-shaped-candle” to make it clear that it’s the candle and not the entrepreneur that’s penis-shaped, but that’s just me.

That article and others report that Vidal was arrested in June 2020 and charged with manslaughter, after someone died at a ritual in which Vidal (allegedly) had them smoke toad venom.

Vidal’s lawyer denies that his client is any sort of shaman, and it looks like the case is still going through the courts.

In the interest of gender equality here, I should probably mention Rebeca Linares, from San Sebastián, up in the Basque Country.

She’s also an adult film star, and I believe you could probably see her and Nacho Vidal sharing a screen, in various positions, if you wanted to google it.

More famous Spanish people… coming soon?

Then there are the historical Spaniards: people like Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, and Diego Velazquez, painter of royalty.

Like I said, another day I’ll talk about some of the best and brightest from Spain’s history, and a few brilliant (living) businessmen who I think deserve at least a Forbes cover or two… We’ve got Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara, as well as Ana Patricia Botín, president of Banco Santander.

Is there anyone else I’m forgetting? I guess I probably am.

Hit me up in the comments if there’s someone you think I’ve left out.

And remember: if a porn-star-turned-shaman and penis-shaped-candle entrepreneur tells you to smoke some toad venom, just say no!

Cheers!

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. Ignorance of other countries, of course, goes both ways. Most Spaniards know jack shit about the US apart from what they see in movies. When I tell people I’m from Phoenix, they might know about Charles Barkley and the Suns in the early 90s. They then proceed to ask me “Arizona is somewhere in Texas, right?”

P.P.S. I guess there’s more I could say about famous Spanish people after all… Did I mention C. Tangana? He’s from around here somewhere. And what about that Goya guy? Also well-known, in the art world.

P.P.P.S. For more fun, check out 4 things I hate about Spain. Or you could try 32 things I love about Spain, if that’s more your style. Or these 5 Spanish stereotypes. Either way, have fun!