The colonisers: first came the Phoenicians
While the Celts and the Iberians lived on the Iberian Peninsula, other peoples arrived from around the Mediterranean Sea. They were attracted by the metals of the Peninsula, like silver, copper and tin. They set up colonies(towns of people from another land) and traded with the people who lived here. There were three main colonising peoples:
The Phoenicians
Excellent sailors and merchants from Phoenicia, in the east of the Mediterranean (today Lebanon). They were the first people to colonise the Iberian Peninsula, in the 12th century BC.
They arrived on the south coast. They founded Gadir around 1100 BC and Malaka around 800 BC. They came to set up new trade routes.
Gadir is today Cádiz, one of the oldest cities in Western Europe, and Malaka is Málaga. And Ibiza? The Phoenicians called it Ibossim, the island of the god Bes. Later the Romans called it Ebusus.
The Phoenicians wrote with an alphabet: a few letters, one for each sound. The Greeks copied it, the Romans copied the Greeks, and today we still use the Roman letters. The word alphabet comes from alpha and beta, the first two Greek letters!