Spain's king makes rare acknowledgement of country's colonial abuses

Spain's King Felipe VI acknowledged abuses in his country's colonial past on Monday, a rare admission by the Spanish crown ​which has never issued a formal apology to former ‌colonies.

At its height in the 16th to 18th centuries, Spain ruled one of the largest empires in world history, spanning five continents including ​much of Central and Latin America, and practiced forced ​labour, land expropriation and violence against Indigenous people.

Spanish colonial ⁠laws "wanted to protect. But in reality, things didn't work out ​as they were originally intended and there was a lot of abuse," ​the king said during a visit to the museum of archaeology in Madrid.

"When we study certain things under modern-day criteria, with our values, obviously, we can’t feel ​proud. But we must learn from this, within its ​context, without too much moralising. We must learn lessons through objective and rigorous analysis,” ‌Felipe ⁠added.

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He toured an exhibition about indigenous women in Mexico and was accompanied by the Mexican ambassador to Spain, Quirino Ordaz.

Spain and Mexico have had diplomatic tensions over the legacy of ​Spanish colonial rule.

In ​2019, Mexico's ⁠then-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador asked the Spanish government and late Pope Francis to apologise to ​indigenous Mexicans for wrongs committed during the ​Spanish conquest, often ⁠in the name of spreading Catholicism and civilisation.

Five years later, Lopez Obrador's successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, decided not to invite the Spanish king ⁠to ​her inauguration after the monarch declined ​to apologise for colonial-era abuses, a snub that Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez ​called "unacceptable".