List of Battleships and Monitors of Spain

List Of Battleships And Monitors Of Spain

This is a list of Spanish battleships and monitors, covering the period from 1874 and the construction of the first modern vessels of these types during the Third Carlist War, through the 1940s when proposals were made for the construction of fast battleships and for the purchase of gun turrets from Germany for use in "large cruisers" - battlecruisers -, although only two monitor type vessels and four battleships were ever actually constructed for the Spanish Navy, while a pair of old armoured frigates were reconstructed into coast defense battleships.

Although a number of ironclads and armoured frigates had served in the Armada since the 1860s, Spain was a latecomer to the construction of modern battleships, with the first and only "pre-Dreadnought" type ship to be operated by the Spanish Navy, Pelayo, being constructed in France in the late 1880s. Plans for additional ships of the type were made, but technical difficulties with the ship, along with a series of military and financial crisises, resulted in Pelayo remaining the only ship of her class.

Despite the decline of Spain as a naval power by the start of the dreadnought era, three ships of the dreadnought type - in fact, the smallest dreadnoughts to be built, essentially being oversized and overgunned coast defense ships - were ordered by the Spanish Navy in 1908. However, construction delays caused by the First World War disrupting delivery of guns from England resulted in the completion of the class being delayed to the point where they were thoroughly obsolete by the time of the final ship being commissioned. A follow-up, more modern class of battleships was cancelled outright as a result of the conflict and the resulting inability to receive British assistance in construction.

Following the end of the First World War, occasional plans for the construction of new battleships were proposed, including a type deriving from England's powerful Nelson class battleships. However, nothing had come of these efforts by the time of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Following the victory of Francisco Franco's Nationalists in that conflict, in which both of the surviving Spanish battleships - one serving on the side of the Nationalists, the other on that of the Republicans - had been destroyed, proposals for the construction of four fast battleships to an Italian design, as well as the construction of "large cruisers" - the only battlecruiser designs proposed for or by Spain - were made. However, the outbreak of the Second World War resulted in these plans being disrupted.

By the end of the Second World War, the aircraft carrier had rendered the battleship obsolete, and no further battleship or large cruiser types were proposed for the Spanish Navy.