Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Iberian Peninsula, also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in southwestern Europe. It is mostly separated from the rest of continental Europe by the Pyrenees, and it includes Peninsular Spain, Continental Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar, and a small part of Metropolitan France.
The Iberian Peninsula covers approximately 583,254 square kilometers and has a population of roughly 53 million. It is the second-largest European peninsula by area, after the Scandinavian Peninsula.
The name is tied to the River Ebro, called Ibēros in ancient Greek and Ibērus or Hibērus in Latin, and the people living near it were called Iberians. The modern phrase Iberian Peninsula was coined by the French geographer Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent in his 1823 work Guide du Voyageur en Espagne.
Members of the Homo genus have lived on the Iberian Peninsula for at least 1.2 million years, as shown by remains in the Atapuerca Mountains. Six hominin skeletons found at Gran Dolina in 1994 are dated between 780,000 and one million years ago.
Al-Andalus is the Arabic name for Muslim Iberia, established after a Muslim army under Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Gibraltar in 711 and conquered all but the northern kingdoms in an eight-year campaign. Under the Caliphate of Córdoba it became a center of culture and learning, described by Jaime Vicens Vives as the most powerful state in Europe.
The highest point on the Iberian Peninsula is Mulhacén in the Sierra Nevada, at 3,478 meters, part of the Penibaetic System. The peninsula has the second highest mean altitude in Western Europe, at 637 meters.
The most widely spoken languages are Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, and Basque. All modern Iberian languages descend from Vulgar Latin except Basque, which is of unknown origin and is the only surviving non-Indo-European language in Iberia and Western Europe.