Beyond the cliched vistas of bullfights and beaches, and beneath the stereotypes of sunshine and sangría, fiestas and siestas there lurks a dark view of Spain that some of its people find bitterly and enduringly unfair.

For more than 500 years, they say, the country’s past has been disfigured and distorted by the propaganda spread by its former opponents and rivals. The so-called leyenda negra – black legend – was spun by chroniclers in England and the Netherlands who supposedly sought to depict their Roman Catholic enemies as unusually cruel and bloodthirsty and to exaggerate the brutality of the Spanish empire and the Inquisition.

Five centuries on, a newly established group, the Hispanic Civilisation Foundation, is hoping to lay the legend to rest by using feature films, TV programmes, books and mobile exhibitions to lighten Spain’s historical image. The foundation, made up of businessmen, diplomats, journalists, lawyers, academics and writers, aims to restore a lost sense of pride in the spread of Spanish culture.

According to the foundation, Spaniards have spent far too long feeling guilty and ashamed of their past and worrying about how they are seen by the rest of the world.

“We need to improve the self-esteem and cohesion of Spaniards when it comes to their shared history and what they have contributed to humanity,” says Borja Cardelús, a writer and vice-president of the foundation. “There are various reasons why self-esteem is so low but it’s fundamentally because neither Spain nor Hispanic countries have cultivated their images.”

Cardelús said that, unlike Spain, the US, the UK and France had used culture and education to foster a favourable international image. “They’ve done this brilliantly well – but Spain hasn’t,” he says. “That has meant that others, outside Spain, have been the ones making Spain’s image, and that’s what’s called the leyenda negra.”

Although he singles out figures such as the Dutchman Theodor de Bry – whose engravings of Spanish imperial atrocities helped cement the conquistadors’ reputation for cruelty – Cardelús lays much of the blame for the black legend at the door of a famous Spaniard.

The 16th-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas has long been feted for his early and fierce defence of the indigenous people of the Americas, but some historians have criticised him for overstating the barbarism of the Spaniards and getting his figures badly wrong. “It’s true that, through his exaggerations and lies, Bartolomé de las Casas managed to get the Spanish crown and the country’s politicians to protect the Indians,” says Cardelús.

“In that respect, his position was very laudable. But Bartolomé de las Casas also suggested that Indians could be saved by importing slaves from Africa.”

Cardelús, who takes a markedly benign view of the conquest of the Americas, argues that Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro brought “a far more humanitarian system” to the Aztec and Inca empires they conquered.

“Cortés and Pizarro went into territories that have been eulogised … but the Aztecs practised human sacrifice,” he says. “Cortés had no problem allying himself with those indigenous people who saw the Spanish as liberators from Aztec oppression. Things were even worse with the Incas, whose empire was very totalitarian.”

What’s more, he says, the black legend has come to eclipse Spain’s role in the development of the concept of human rights through the School of Salamanca.

Others have a more nuanced view of Spain’s imperial adventures and subsequent reputation. “I don’t deny the existence of the black legend – you can’t deny the evidence of that negative criticism,” says Ricardo García Cárcel, a historian and author of books on the black legend, the Golden Age and the inquisition. “But I do question the fatalistic, victim mentality that surrounds the issue: ‘Oh, poor Spain! What have we done to deserve this?’”

If you look at the Spanish empire from a historical point of view, he says, it becomes clear that it had its bright patches as well as its ugly shadows. Take, for example, Spain’s Golden Age literature and the huge interest in the works of Cervantes which were translated and spread across the world.

“There were evident virtues when you think of the cultural projection in both Europe and the Americas,” adds García Cárcel. “You can’t deny the existence of that extraordinary cultural empire. But you also have scenes of military violence like the sack of Antwerp.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some suggest that anxiety about the Spanish world image has been sparked by the recent Catalan independence movement. Photograph: Manu Fernandez/AP

He argues that Spain never had the necessary resources to come up with a counter-legend. “It lost the image war and the war of public opinion in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.”

He also wonders whether this latest public show of anxiety over Spain’s international image has been prompted by recent events in Catalonia, and by the periodic national tendency to indulge in soul-searching. “We’re living through the old problem of national consciousness and the dismantling of the nation state called Spain, which is being called into question by the whole Catalan question,” he says.

“Amid this national insecurity, we’re seeing the return of a phrase that we thought was dead and buried. Spain is once again obsessively – almost neurotically – fixed on what other people think.”

Cardelús denies there is any political dimension to the foundation’s work and says the fact that its emergence has coincided with the political crisis in Catalonia is purely coincidental.

But he adds: “It does seem an opportune moment because one of the things we’re trying to do is bring together all the people of Spain when it comes to what we’ve done and what we’ve contributed.” He also rejects suggestions that this is all an attempt to whitewash the country’s colonial past.

“We’re not looking to swap the black legend for a rose-tinted legend,” he says. “We’re looking to swap the black legend for the truth.”

Emilio Sáenz-Francés, a lecturer in history and international relations at Madrid’s Comillas Pontifical university is sceptical about the notion that the legend still fogs foreign eyes. Perhaps one reason for the survival of la leyenda negra, he suggests, is Spain’s lasting fascination with it.

“Well-informed people around the world know pretty well what Spain’s history has been and though they may have a cliched image of Spain, it’s no worse than that of the UK when it comes to certain things or France in other things,” he says. “But I think there’s something a little bit self-punishing in the Spanish mentality.”