Inside Terra’s glory and death: the backstory of Spain’s first internet giant

Olé, launched in 1996, became the first web search engine in Spanish and the seed of Terra.

Pep Vallés and Josep Gaspa Rovira built the project with support from the Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca.

Vallés’s commercial background helped drive the startup’s creation and early expansion during the web’s first boom.

Terra went on to become Spain’s first major internet portal, shaping how Spanish speakers accessed the web before the dot-com bubble.