Lesbians have always been in Spain; their history, the history of women with exclusive sexual and romantic attraction to other women, of women who had sex with other women, is as old as Spain itself and likely pre-dates the first references to them in Roman Spanish sources.  In its earliest documented periods, the history of lesbianism in Spain often mirrors that of Southern and Western Europe more broadly, making it appear not very unique because lack of sources and because of the political hegemony of the Roman Empire on thinking of the day.

  The lack of a more detailed sexual and romantic history of everyday life of Spanish lesbians, especially in Spain’s earliest periods, is lost as a result of a number of factors, including much of the historical writing being about men, a lack of interest in writing about women in general and even less interest in writing about women’s sexuality, and a history of patriarchy that rendered women secondary to men.  This historical reality predated the Roman period and did not to end until around the 1960s with some rare moments of exception.  It leaves a period of 2000 years where the story of women is told through a male perspective primarily by male writers.  The known story of lesbians in Spain though begins in Hispania in the Roman period around 200 CE.

Dating as far back as the 4th century BCE, the Celts, one of the groups dominating much of central and northwestern modern-day Spain, were well known in the ancient world for their tolerance of male homosexuality, with the odd feature of that period where free men could voluntarily enter into relationships with other free men, not needing a master/slave type relationship for it to be societally acceptable.  To some degree, it is believed that similar attitudes might have existed among Celtic women in Hispania, which Roman women moving into the around between the 2nd century BCE and the 2nd century CE would adopt.

While male homosexuality was generally widely known and accepted in the Roman Empire, female sexuality in generally was not widely discussed.  Most references in historical graffiti written by women expressing sexual desire were exclusively for men, in contrast to their male peers who expressed sexual desire for both men and women. The few exceptions that existed to this all are outside Spain.  When information about lesbian desire is available in this period, it often come from sources such as medical texts, love spells, astrology, and dream interpretation texts.  When men of Hispania focused their interest on female-on-female sexual desire in this period, they often did so using a phallic device and more often drew from Greek inspiration than from other parts of the empire.  Lesbianism itself was not unknown, but was more commonly referred to as tribadism, also called scissoring.  It reflected on the view of women’s sexuality being defined around sexual activities. Women practicing tribadism in the Roman world were also associated with more stereotypically male behaviors of the period including hunting, fighting and more aggressive sexual behavior.

A Church Council was held from 305 to 306 in Elvira, modern day Granada, to discuss the issue of homosexual acts.  It was one of the first Church Councils to explicitly deal with regulating sexual behavior and showed a split in views with the Church in Europe’s east.  While male homosexuality was condemned, women’s homosexuality was not mentioned at all.  Instead, the focus for women’s sexuality was on acts of adultery and prostitution, with punishment for women as harsh as those against men committing sodomy.

Spain’s medieval period ran from around 400 CE, when the Roman Empire went into decline and Germanic tribes began incursions into the Iberian Peninsula. The era would continue largely until 1500, ending with the success of the Reconquista.  The history of Spanish women in this period is largely absent from available texts, and even less is known about their sexual practices.  Much information requires filling in logical gaps or making extrapolations based on laws of this period, religious texts and legal texts.

The incoming Germanic Visigoths condemned homosexuality and broadly viewed women with contempt, seeing them as little more than slaves. Despite tolerance for homosexuality generally within the Roman Empire, the end of this period did not result in lax attitudes towards both male and female homosexuals in Visigoth Spain because the newcomers attitudes towards homosexuality.  The Visigoth hegemony at the time covered almost all of Spain with the exception of areas of the Mediterranean coast from the area near modern day Gibraltar to modern day Alicante and the Balearic Islands.

In 589, the Visigoth Kingdom’s leaders converted from Arianism to Catholicism, a switch the local population had already made resulting in the populace viewing Visigoth rulers as heretics.  The change in state sanctioned religion resulted in a number of changes in laws.  This included laws that resulted in the persecution of homosexuals and other groups, including Jews.  Primarily though, these laws applying to homosexuality addressed male homosexuality, not female homosexuality.  By 650, laws condemning homosexuality had been modified and no longer included religious references or Sodom as reason for the practice being outlawed, instead just describing the behavior as moral depravity.  Once again, most of these references explicitly referred to male sexual practices, largely ignoring women’s same-sex sexual practices in law. New laws were passed in 693 by Egica at a Church Council in Toledo.  These laws were the most virulently anti-homosexual in the whole of Christendom at the time, but they appeared to exclusively target men.

The lack of tolerance for homosexuality, which largely ignored women, did not mean women avoid prosecution for sex with other women; some lesbians in this period were found guilty of penetrating other women with dildos and given the death penalty for that. Lack of a penetrative device used in sex with women saved some women as they were given less severe punishment.

In the end, Visigoth intolerance for homosexuality as a way of preserving the population from moral depravity did little to protect their kingdoms.  In 711, the Muslim Moors of North Africa started their invasion of the Iberian peninsula, ushering in a new era that in some parts of Spain would last 700 years where homosexuality, both male and female though mostly male, would be openly tolerated among the elite in Moorish society and in Moorish literature.  Lesbianism was particularly common inside harems in Moorish Spain, especially in the later periods where relationships between Muslims and Christians were more common.  Words used to describe female same sex behavior included sahq, sihaq or sihaqa which are approximate to lesbianism and sahiqa, sahhaqa or musahiqa which were approximate to lesbian in Arabic of that period.  As women were afforded access to education for the first time in Spain in this period, some went on to become poets who treated with normalcy the idea of women having sex with other women for pleasure. Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, daughter of Muhammad III of Córdoba born in Córdoba in 994, was one of the most well-known poets of this period. Important ninth century works on lesbianism produced in Moorish Spain or that eventually made their way to Spain include Kitab al-Sahhakat and The Book of Hind.

Spain’s Jewish population in this period and into the tenth century, living under Moorish dominion, also had few taboos about homosexuality, with depictions of such love and sex featuring in poetry of the period until around the end of the twelfth century.  Like their Moorish counterparts, most of this poetry featured male homosexuality with only occasional references to lesbians. Most of it was written in Hebrew and was rarely ever shared outside the Jewish community and almost none featured women as they were just not that interesting to Jewish religious leaders. This tolerance of homosexuality by Jews in this period would later be used against them in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Christian oppressors to cast the whole population as immoral beings, perverts and a depraved people.