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This paper reviews the development of general didactics in Spain in the past 40 years. It describes and explains the relations between academic and political development with respect to education in Spain, the democratisation of the Spanish university and the relations between the different academic and administrative fields of general didactics, domain-specific didactics, the psychology of education, sociology and the philosophy of education. Special emphasis is put on a description of the relations between didactics and school organisation as something particular to the field. In addition, the paper describes the impact of Europeanisation of the field as well as the relations with Latin America in order to specify the typically Spanish culture of the academic discipline of didactics. The authors close with a description of the challenges and difficulties the field is facing nowadays, thereby aiming at a recovery of the study of educational practice.