The Andalusians () are the people of Andalusia, an autonomous community in southern Spain. Andalusia's statute of autonomy defines Andalusians as the Spanish citizens who reside in any of the municipalities of Andalusia, as well as those Spaniards who reside abroad and had their last Spanish residence in Andalusia, and their descendants. Since reform in 2007, the Andalusian statute of autonomy identifies the territory as a historic nationality in the preamble. The Spanish Language Academy recognizes Andalusian Spanish as a set of diverse dialects. Andalusian nationalism is the belief that Andalusians are a nation separate from other ethnicities within Spain.
History and culture
In Antiquity, Andalusian people used to trade with Phoenicians and Sephardi Jews some thousand years before the Common Era, and they were called as Tarshish or Tartessos in the Old Testament and Greek texts. The genesis of modern Andalusian culture can be traced to the incorporation of the Moors territory to the Crown of Castile during the Middle Ages at the end of the Reconquista. It also coincides with the arrival of the Gitanos in the mid 15th century who also contributed to the culture of modern Andalusia and the expels of non-converted Muslims and Jews in 1492, and finally with the forced expulsion of all moriscos of Spain between 1609 and 1613. Subsequently the region was influential in the development of the Columbian exchange and global trade where Seville and Cadiz took a fundamental part. In fact, Blas Infante, the creator of Andalusian nationalism, drew heavily from the Regenerationism movement in Spain after the loss of Spain's last territories in the Caribbean and Asia in the Spanish–American War conflict.
There is a binomial denomination of Andalusia as High and Low, where High refers to the territory in the Baetic system and Low to the valley of the Guadalquivir river (that descends from the Baetic system to the Atlantic Ocean). The autonomous community institutions are in a good part in Low Andalusia (Seville). When that has been seen as a source of centrism there have been groups formed to make the problems visible. An example was the lack of a Spanish high speed train to Granada. The service has since launched, starting in 2019.
The Andalusians have a rich traditional culture which includes Flamenco style of music and dance developed in Andalusia and the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Another example of traditional culture is the Holy Week ("Semana Santa"), shared with other Hispanic countries in America or the Philippines (see Holy Week in Spain, Holy Week observances and Holy Week in the Philippines). Spanish Catholic religion constitute a traditional vehicle of Andalusian cultural cohesion and the levels of participation seems to be independent of political preferences and orthodoxy. All the different regions of Andalusia have developed their own distinctive customs, but all share a connectedness to Catholicism as developed during baroque Spain society.
Genetics
Genetic tests show a strong presence of Y-DNA J-M172 (Levant) and E-M81 in Andalusian Men, with E-M81 (North Africa) being most commonly found in the Province of Huelva and J-M172 being most common in the Province of Granada.
Geographical location and population
Andalusian people live mainly in Spain's eight southernmost provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga, and Sevilla, which all are part of the region and modern Autonomous Community of Andalucía. In January 2006 the total population of this region stood at 7,849,799; Andalucía is the most populous region of Spain. In comparison with the rest of Spain, Andalusia population growth has been slower and it continues to be sparsely populated in some rural areas (averaging just 84 inh. per km2). Since 1960, the region's share of total population has declined, despite birth rates being about 40 percent higher than the Spanish average during past decades (currently it is only 13% higher.) Between 1951 and 1975, over 1.7 million Andalusian people emigrated out of the region to other areas of Spain. This figure was approximately a 24% of the population of Andalusia as a whole, mostly hitting the countryside areas. The main recipients of this migration were Catalonia (989,256 people of Andalusian origin in 1975), Madrid (330,479) and Valencia (217,636), and to a lesser level, the Basque Country and Balearics.