While the idea of lifelong education in Spain is much older, the history of the concept begins in the 1960s. As digital libraries are becoming a source of new data for researchers, the aim of this study is to examine the history of the terms related to lifelong education and learning in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries by using data published before 1960 and available in Massive Digital Libraries, such as Google Books and HathiTrust. The analysis of books and different kinds of texts and discourses published in Spanish from 1400 until 1959 revealed three formative periods in the development of lifelong education that begin in 18th-century Spain during the Enlightenment and spread to Latin America by the mid-19th century where most of the activity is focused in the following century. What emerges are different conceptualisations of permanent education shaped by the social, political, and economic context as well as influential philosophical movements, such as Krausism and positivism, on one hand, and by a variety of actors on the other hand.