More than a half-century since its formal recognition by Spain’s government in 1968, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints not only continues to expand but also is growing ever more cosmopolitan in the European nation.
The reason is largely immigrants, not native Spaniards, who have fanned out across the Continent.
Melitón González Trejo, who was baptized in 1874, was the first Spaniard to join the church, according to church records. He became a member after moving to Utah and subsequently played a prominent part in translating the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, into Spanish and helping establish the church in Mexico.
As for those early converts in Spain, most of them ended up emigrating to Utah.
That started to change with the 1966 baptism of Jose Maria Oliveira, a former filmmaker recently profiled by The Salt Lake Tribune.
Rather than leaving to join Latter-day Saints in Utah, Oliveira stayed in Spain and played a pivotal role in helping the church win recognition and spread out there. Today, due largely to Spanish converts like Oliveira — who came to the Beehive State decades later — and scores of missionaries, Spain has more than 68,000 members, nearly 140 congregations and one Latter-day Saint temple (with plans for a second).
[Read more here about the church’s start in Spain and Jose Oliveira, a prominent convert whose macabre movies introduced Spanish audiences to heavy church doctrines.]
(Brigham Young University) Jose Oliveira speaks at a screening of his movie at BYU in the fall 2022.
Still growing after all these years
Indeed, Spain has the second-most Latter-day Saints of any European country, behind only the United Kingdom‘s 186,000 members.
In 2024, reports independent researcher Matt Martinich, who tracks the church’s growth and retention around the world for ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, the faith enjoyed its most rapid European growth in decades. Membership in Spain, for example, swelled by 3.85% last year, the highest uptick since 2007.
And immigrants — there and elsewhere in Europe — are fueling much of that growth.
Martinich said most converts in Spain today originally hail from Latin American and African countries, with Latin Americans making up about 80% of the members in some congregations.
“Unlike some of the negative stuff you might read about the church shrinking in Europe, that is definitely not true in Spain,” Martinich said. “Instead, the church in Spain is becoming much more cosmopolitan and more based on immigrants than the native population.”
Maria Brimhall, Jose Oliveira’s daughter, doesn’t need to eyeball stats to envision the immigrant surge in Spanish congregations. She said there were only two native Spanish families at the last stake (regional) conference she went to in Madrid.
“When you attend church in Spain,” Brimhall said, “you see most members are from Latin [American] countries like Ecuador and Venezuela.”
Encyclopedias, orange sodas
For his part, Paul Laemmlen remembers the difficulty he and his missionary companions often had in getting teaching opportunities during his church service in Spain during the late 1970s. He said most Spaniards were staunch Catholics and uninterested in the Utah-based faith.
The message, moreover, did not always resonate with those they taught, even when the missionaries were fluent in the language. One of his favorite memories is the time he and a companion finished telling the story of church founder Joseph Smith to a middle-age man.
“Well, what do you think?” he recalled asking. “And [the man] goes, ‘Well, I don’t want to buy any encyclopedias, but do you want a glass of orange soda?’”
