Reina Victoria Eugenia-class battleship

Following disastrous losses in the Spanish–American War of 1898, Spain lacked the money to rebuild its navy, though the naval command made repeated requests for funding to begin reconstruction.

As the Navy had little experience designing capital ships, it issued a set of specifications for the battleships and requested proposals from foreign shipbuilders, securing tenders from British, French, Italian, and Austro-Hungarian shipyards.

The Navy then took the best characteristics from each submission and made its own improvements before awarding the contract to Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval (SECN), a consortium created by three of the British firms—Armstrong Whitworth, Vickers, and John Brown & Company.

[5][6] The repeated delays in the Spanish naval reconstruction program proved to be a detriment as well, since the Españas were rapidly surpassed by foreign vessels, most notably the so-called "super-dreadnoughts".

Other specifications of the ships were either never decided upon or have not survived, although according to the naval historians Robert Gardiner and Randal Gray, it is probable that they would have had an arrangement similar to British battleships of the period, with two pairs of superfiring turrets, one forward and one aft, with two closely spaced funnels.

The start of World War I in July 1914 threw the Spanish plans into disarray; after Italy declared neutrality, Spain followed suit, since her fleet was unnecessary for France to contain the Austro-Hungarians by itself.

After the war, the navy considered another major construction program centered on four battlecruisers that would have displaced around 30,000 long tons (30,481 t), but it was deemed to have been too ambitious and the plan was not formally proposed to parliament.