Romance
The romance is the narrative ballad of the Spanish-speaking world: a sung poem in octosyllabic lines with assonant rhyme, telling of battles, frontier raids on the Moorish border, doomed loves, saints and kings. Collected in the romancero, the body of ballads descending from late-medieval epic, romances were Spain's popular history for centuries, carried by blind balladeers, printed in chapbooks and preserved in oral tradition from Castile to the Sephardic diaspora. The twentieth-century folk revival returned them to the concert stage through singers such as *Paco Ib谩帽ez* and *Joaqu铆n D铆az*.