[livius]

And they wasted it all on foreign wars in Northern Europe. There is one particularly odd sight I remember seeing in the town of Plasencia in Extremadura (western Spain), where a number of sailors had come from and which received substantial amounts in gold every year. They had started to build a lavish new church - and then suddenly they stopped, because the king needed all of the gold for his foreign wars. The church, hundreds of years later, is still only half-built.

[PatrickHenry]

Right, they squandered it. All of it. When the Spanish Empire ended in the Western Hemisphere, after 300 years of continuous plunder, Spain was probably the poorest country in Europe. But it was fun while it lasted. I imagine the same will be true of certain Middle Eastern countries when the oil money stops.