Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first contact between Western culture and Buddhist culture occurred during Alexander the Great's conquest of India. Greek colonies existed in India as early as the 6th century BCE, during the Buddha's lifetime, and the first Westerners to become Buddhists were Greeks who settled in Bactria and India during the Hellenistic period.
Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott were described by Stephen Prothero as the first European-Americans to publicly and formally become lay Buddhists, taking that step in 1880. Olcott went on to become a major figure in the Sinhalese Buddhist revival and wrote the influential Buddhist Catechism, published in 1881.
The 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago brought together Japanese Buddhist delegations representing the Rinzai Zen, Jodo Shinshu, Nichiren, Tendai, and Shingon schools, along with Sri Lankan teacher Anagarika Dharmapala, whose English-language speech drew wide attention. The psychologist William James, after hearing Dharmapala speak on Buddhist psychology, reportedly said that it was "the psychology everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now."
D. T. Suzuki arrived in the United States in 1897 to work and study with Paul Carus and became the single most important figure in popularizing Zen Buddhism in the West. His writings shaped psychologists Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and thinkers including Alan Watts and Edward Conze.
Buddhist modernism, also called "protestant Buddhism," is a reinterpretation of Buddhism as compatible with modern science and Enlightenment rationalism. Key early figures include Henry Olcott, Paul Carus, and Soyen Shaku. Olcott's Buddhist Catechism argued that Buddhists should believe only what is corroborated by reason, while Paul Carus described Buddhism as a "Religion of Science" in his widely translated work The Gospel of Buddhism.
The tallest stupa in Europe is the Benalmadena Enlightenment Stupa in Malaga, in the Andalusian region of southern Spain. It stands 33 metres (108 feet) high and was inaugurated on the 5th of October 2003, serving as the final project of Buddhist master Lopon Tsechu Rinpoche.