The service was launched in response to broadcasts by the governments of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, which had begun a strong propaganda campaign aimed at Latin America.

The Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska remembers how her mother told her about her trust in the BBC: "We lived in México and she looked frenetically for news about the war because my father was at the frontline".

When World War II began, the BBC Latin American Service was important in countering propaganda from Axis Power radio networks.

However, the BBC's Spanish-language radio also gave a lot of prominence to culture thanks to journalists such as Juan Peirano, Eduardo de Benito, Julio García, and Jackie Richards.

The spread of satellite transmissions as well as the emergence of the web and the competition with television channels resulted in the decline of shortwave broadcasting in the region.

The BBC's Spanish service also has a newsroom in Miami, offices in Buenos Aires and México City, and reporters in Washington DC, Los Angeles, Havana, Caracas, Bogotá, Santiago, Quito, Lima and Madrid.

The service's website was born in 1999 as a debate site – a single page dedicated to encouraging a weekly discussion of specific subjects on the global news agenda.

The first major wave of change involved recruitment, training, and staffing and resulted in the creation of the site indexes needed to deliver full 24/7 region-specific, interactive, and multimedia coverage.

Alvarez says that one of the key distinguishing features of BBC Mundo is "the range of its editorial remit, where technology, science, health, art, and culture are treated with the same relevance as current-affairs stories.

At the beginning of 2014, 15 years after its creation, bbcmundo.com had over 8.5 million monthly unique visitors who read its stories, follow its live texts, watch its videos, and share their comments via its Facebook and Twitter accounts.